Non-fiction novel

Operación Masacre (1957) details the José León Suárez massacre, which involved the 1956 capture and shooting of Peronist militants, including the rebel leader Juan José Valle. These events followed a 1955 military coup, known as the Revolución Libertadora, which deposed the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón and eventually brought the hard-line general Pedro Eugenio Aramburu to power.

Truman Capote later adopted the genre. He argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. He was immediately intrigued after reading the story of the Clutter murders in The New York Times, and used the events surrounding the crime as a basis for In Cold Blood (1965). He spent years tracking the story, spent considerable time with the people involved, watched hours of film footage, listened to recordings, and read transcripts and notes. He once claimed that everything within the book would be true, word for word. To gather details, Capote interviewed the murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. But Ben Yagoda notes that "almost from the start, skeptics challenged the accuracy of In Cold Blood. One early revelation (acknowledged by Capote before his death in 1984) was that the last scene in the book, a graveyard conversation between a detective and the murdered girl’s best friend, was pure invention."[10]

In his review of the book in The American Scholar, Robert Langbaum wrote, "Once we look at structure, we find many nonfiction works as artful and sometimes more artful than many novels. Northrop Frye has, in his influential Anatomy of Criticism, gone so far as to apply the word fiction to any 'work of art in prose.' ... By taking [Capote] at his word and comparing his book to a novel, we can both appreciate his achievement and see its limits. For its best effects are novelistic and it falls short just where it is not novelistic enough."[11]

Other examples of the form are:

• The Armies of the Night (1968), Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winner and perhaps the most critically appreciated non-fiction novel, is a narrative which is split into a history and a novel, and which autobiographically recounts the 1967 March on the Pentagon in the third person. Later, he wrote The Executioner's Song (1979).
• Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) by Alex Haley, which relates the story of the author and his family history for nine generations
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) by John Berendt
• According to Queeney (2001) by Beryl Bainbridge, which describes the last few years of Samuel Johnson's life as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale, the eldest daughter of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale's

In Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) was an example of the school of New Journalism (often characterized as an invention of the mid-1960s), the novel is hybridized with journalistic narration, which, like Capote's prose, places little emphasis on the process of narration (although Wolfe, unlike Capote, occasionally narrates from first-person).

Hunter S. Thompson's approach of "Gonzo Journalism" (in books like Hell's Angels (1966)) abandoned Capote's narrative style to intermingle personal experiences and observations with more traditional journalism.

In the 1970s, authors began to re-publish essays or articles by uniting episodic works into a more cohesive whole, such as Michael Herr's non-fiction novel, Dispatches (1977), which reflects on the journalist's reporting from Vietnam.

Since the 1970s, the non-fiction novel has somewhat fallen out of favor. However, forms such as the extended essay, the memoir, and the biography (and autobiography), as well as autofiction, can explore similar territory. Joan Didion, for instance, has never called her own work a "non-fiction novel", while she has been repeatedly credited for doing so with what she generally calls "extended" or "long" essays.

After her husband Wyatt Earp's death, Josephine Earp sought to get her own life story published. When she refused to be more forthcoming about details of her life in Tombstone, her collaborators gave up and Josephine asked them to burn all the copies. Wyatt's cousins Mabel Earp Carson held back a copy, which amateur historian Glen Boyer eventually acquired the rights to.[13]

The University of Arizona Press published it in 1976 as a memoir I Married Wyatt Earp giving Josephine Earp credit as the author. In the book's epilogue, Boyer said he integrated two sources, Josephine's and a second, the so-called "Clum manuscript", which he said had been written by The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum based on conversations with Josephine.[13]

In the 1980s, critics began to question his sources and methods. When Boyer could not prove the existence of the Clum manuscript, he equivocated, saying that he did not receive the Clum manuscript from Colyn after all, instead it was given to him by one of Earp's nieces. Then he changed his story further, saying, "the Clum manuscript is a generic term," Boyer told Wildcat student-reporter Ryan Gabrielson. "This--in addition [to other source materials]--was supported by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of letters and documents."[14]

When confronted with allegations that his book was a hoax, Boyer said he had been misunderstood. "My work is beginning to be recognized by all but a few fanatics and their puppets as a classic example of the newly recognized genre 'creative non-fiction.'"[15] In March 2000, the University of Arizona Press removed the book from their catalog.[16]