In Cold Blood | Literary Precedents
Capote would have said there were no literary precedents for his book. AH his life he felt he had not been given his due for inventing a new form. Certainly the New Journalism and writers like Norman Mailer owe Capote a debt. Yet critics cite John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), among others, as precursors to Capote's experiment. Still the books they point to are different in form from Capote's. They are either clearly novels based on real events or they are clearly journalism told novelistically. If Capote's story had been a...
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