Bias In Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Option Three: Bias
Truman Capote’s final book In Cold Blood, was an instant hit with readers when it came out in 1966. Capote himself hailed it as a new genre of literature, a nonfiction true crime thriller. However, upon reading the book, it seems as though Capote shifted the truth to make it fit his own personal narrative, and put in his own personal bias toward the criminals, and seeks to have the reader sympathize with the criminals and seeks to challenge their attitudes towards the criminals. In doing so Capote invents a new genre of literature by telling the story through a new perspective.
Capote as a writer chooses to put most of the focus of the book on the criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, particularly Smith. He follows Smith’s life story, and explains that Smith was abused as a child, and the reader is to infer that as a result he seeks approval from others. This approval is what leads him to kill, and invent stories about killing, as he wants Dick to think of him as macho. Capote provides a plethora of evidence to support this reasoning, “He was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns- shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed,” (93). Subsequently, Capote continues to mention Perry’s awful childhood throughout the book, and

Innocently, Hickock’s mother and father are the type of parents who believe that their child is an angel, and could do no wrong. They couldn’t bear to lose him, and soon fall to pieces when Dick is sentenced to death, with Mr. Hickock dying of cancer only a few months later. By bringing Hickock’s family into the story, Capote forces the reader to imagine if one of their own relatives was facing execution, and whether or not they would believe that a loved one could commit such a horrific