In a 1966 interview, author Truman Capote envisioned a novel where “every word of it would be true from beginning to end.” Originally published in a serialised four part article in The New Yorker, In Cold Bloodrecounts the brutal 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and its aftermath. Capote’s novel is considered to be an influential work in the ‘true crime’ and ‘nonfiction’ genre, however its factual accuracy has been questioned. 

Through a comparative text analysis of the 1965 magazine article and the first 1966 Random House edition of the novel, amendments, additions and redactions begin to emerge. These revisions include punctuation, syntax, grammatical tense, factual changes and the characterisation of real people. Using a 1960s typewriter to refer to the original time period, this text analysis offers a different reading of Capote’s work, where the red colour coding of text indicates additions in the novel and strikethrough lines highlight redactions from the article. The variations of changes across the documents signify the extent of Capote’s amendments, which affect both small details and significant claims. The change of form from a serialised magazine to a book provides insight into Capote’s writing process of revisions, while also revealing the discrepancies.