[4] Scholar David Schmid writes that "many American writers during the post-World War II period, including Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, [chose] to follow Hersey’s lead.
[7] Early influences on the genre can be traced to books such as Ka-tzetnik 135633's (Yehiel Dinur) novellas Salamdra (1946) and House of Dolls (1953), Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), and John Dos Passos's USA trilogy (1930–36).
[8] House of Dolls describes the journey of the young 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.
[11] These events followed a 1955 military coup, self-titled as “Revolución Libertadora” (“The Liberating Revolution”),[11] which deposed the Argentine constitutional president Juan Domingo Perón and installed a dictatorship (whose leader was the hard-line general Pedro Eugenio Aramburu) into power.
[citation needed] 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).
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.
[citation needed] A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Serbo-Croatian: Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča / Гробница за Бориса Давидовича) is a collection of seven short stories by Danilo Kiš published in 1976 (and translated into English by Duska Mikic-Mitchell in 1978).
[citation needed] Later works classified as non-fiction novels include The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey: A Nonfiction Novel (1993) by Bland Simpson, which tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of 19-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901;[citation needed] In the Time of the Butterflies (1995) by Julia Alvarez, which fictionalizes the lives of the Mirabal sisters who gave their lives fighting a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, based on their accounts;[citation needed] and A Civil Action (1996) by Jonathan Harr, which describes the drama caused by a real-life water contamination scandal in Massachusetts in the 1980s.
[citation needed] Homer Hickam, author of Rocket Boys (1998) and other well-known memoirs, has described his work as novel-memoirs or "novoirs", wherein he uses novelistic techniques, including fictional conversations, to allow the essential truth of his stories to be revealed.