Word: fictioneers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FICTION...
Homosexuality is more in evidence in the U.S. than ever before-as an almost inevitable subject matter in fiction, a considerable influence in the arts, a highly visible presence in the cities, from nighttime sidewalks to the most "in" parties. The latest Rock Hudson movie explicitly jokes about it, Doubleday Book Shops run smirking ads for The Gay Cookbook, and newsstands make room for "beefcake" magazines of male nudes. Whether the number of homosexuals has actually increased is hard to say. In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males...
...this brutal and senseless real-life event Truman Capote has built his latest book. It would be hard to imagine a more implausible crime reporter. Though Capote had ventured into non-fiction before, his reputation had been secured by short novels (The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's) and stories of such delicacy that their wispy author has been called, among many other things, "the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers...
Shortly after the murders, Capote was propelled to Kansas, a region that is as alien to his spirit as Mars, by the scarcely original premise that any truth exhaustively explored can furnish better story material than fiction. He dogged the story off and on for six years. A diminutive, eccentric and lisping presence on Midwest territory, whose citizens at first scarcely knew what to make of him, Capote commanded the attention and ultimately the respect of everyone he approached, including the killers. His memory stored scores of interviews, which he set down later in 6,000 pages of notes...
...Capote had only presented a bare history, colored with reportorial irony, In Cold Blood would be merely suspenseful and provoking non-fiction. But it is a novel, for Capote, with singular grace, hovers between profound irony and melodrama--the irony of collision and the drama of a not inconsiderable sense of fate. The central impact of the amassed documentation derives from the compelling personality of the central figure, Perry Smith, and his belief in fate. By the time we have come to know Perry and his fated family, for whom the "solution" to life has frequently been violent suicide...