Speaking of myths …

… Dismantling the Capote myth | Jack Shafer.

A new book by Ralph L. Voss, Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood, draws on previous literary forensics and his own scholarship to demonstrate Capote’s shocking faithlessness to the truth. Capote disputed his critics’ claims that he had dropped fiction into his non-fiction, telling one interviewer in 1972 that Esquire was wrong, reiterating: “What I wrote in the book was true.” Even though Voss spends only a couple of chapters debunking In Cold Blood (most of it is a celebration of the book and its influence), he makes it impossible for readers to deny that Capote cut corners, sweetened his material, wrote passages that argue with the facts in his notes and invented scenes.