Item Detail
-
22847
-
1
-
0
-
English
-
Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Good Land : The Nonfiction Novel in the Southwest
-
Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest : Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands
-
Bowling Green, Ohio
-
Bowling Green State University Popular Press
-
197-209
-
"True-crime reporting traces its roots to the book of Genesis and the first act of fratricide. From this lofty provenance the genre plunged to a gutter existence of tawdry pulp sensationalism until resurrected by towering figures in American letters, analyzing deeds that occurred in our own Southwest. These figures, Capote and Mailer, challenged the literary establishment - and each other - with claims to have founded a completely new art form based on Southwestern cowboys, crimes, and cops. The task I set for myself in this essay is, first of all, to focus on the innovations and problems of this now maturing form and, in due course, pay some attention to the one issue that might founder any practitioner of a form with the oxymoronic title of 'nonfiction novel.'" [From author's introduction]