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 was one of the first authors who was recognized for non-fiction novel writing. Capote read the story of the Clutter murders in The New York Times newspaper, was immediately intrigued, 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. Although this is impossible, the majority of information is accurate and extremely detailed. That Capote was able to interview the murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, meant that he was able to establish their characters, making the details within the book exceptionally accurate.

Capote argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. After the publication of In Cold Blood, many authors tested the form's "original" concept; notably including Hunter S. Thompson (with Hell's Angels (1966)), Norman Mailer (with Armies of the Night (1968)), and Tom Wolfe (with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)).

Other examples of faction are:

• House of Dolls (1953), Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel Dinur), describes the journey of the young Jewess Daniella Parleshnik during the Holocaust, as she becomes part of the "Joy Division", a Nazi system keeping Jewish women as sex slaves in concentration camps. The book's plot was inspired by the Dinur's experience from the Holocaust and his younger sister, who did not survive the Holocaust. The book is considered by many to one of the first in the genre.
• 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
• 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
• The Executioner's Song (1979) by Norman Mailer
• 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 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). Thompson's approach of "Gonzo Journalism" 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.[5]

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.[5]

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."[6]

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.'"[7] In March 2000, the University of Arizona Press removed the book from their catalog.[8]