Dear TCL Readers, I hope your 2023 is starting well. Mine is, thank goodness, after a last-few-weeks-of-2022 best forgotten (a second bout of Covid is decidedly not recommended.) Among the changes I’m trying to make is to send out newsletters more regularly, since I fell out of that habit in a big way last year. It helps that I have some new work to talk about, including
I enjoyed reading this installment of the newsletter but wanted to point out that the statement "a significant amount of [In Cold Blood] was fictionalized" doesn't bear scrutiny. A significant amount of research has been devoted to this topic, including an early attempt by a University of Kansas professor, Philip Tompkins, to check out Capote's sources. He found factual discrepancies only concerning very minor facts, such as how much Nancy Clutter's horse sold for after the family's deaths. Tompkins' article is here:
Tompkins, Phillip K. "In Cold Fact." Esquire, June 1966, pp. 125, 127, 166-71.
I suggest doing some reading about this and am happy to correspond if I can be of help.
Lana Whited
author of Murder in Fact: Disillusionment and Death in the American True Crime Novel (2020)
I enjoyed reading this installment of the newsletter but wanted to point out that the statement "a significant amount of [In Cold Blood] was fictionalized" doesn't bear scrutiny. A significant amount of research has been devoted to this topic, including an early attempt by a University of Kansas professor, Philip Tompkins, to check out Capote's sources. He found factual discrepancies only concerning very minor facts, such as how much Nancy Clutter's horse sold for after the family's deaths. Tompkins' article is here:
Tompkins, Phillip K. "In Cold Fact." Esquire, June 1966, pp. 125, 127, 166-71.
I suggest doing some reading about this and am happy to correspond if I can be of help.
Lana Whited
author of Murder in Fact: Disillusionment and Death in the American True Crime Novel (2020)
lwhited@ferrum.edu