Telling the truth

In the American creative nonfiction genre, the line between fact and fiction is ever-blurring. Two novels which strive for realness and are thematically related in their focus on a cause célèbre and the death penalty, Truman Capote's In cold blood and Norman Mailer's The executioner's song, offer clues that might help approach the question of what makes a specific work fall under the category of creative nonfiction. I analyze the creative techniques that the authors use in their novels, and I consider details from the texts about the activeness and reliability of the narrators in the two books, as well as consequent political implications. Additionally, I ground my examination of these novels in a discussion of the progress from the early novel's drive for realism to twentieth-century literary journalism.