Consider Capote’s assertion and how it relates to your novel. Then write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies the notion that your novel exhibits this “timeless quality.”

Encyclopedia Britannica defines the nonfiction novel as a “story of actual people and actual events told with the dramatic techniques of a novel.” Author Truman Capote, who wrote perhaps the first nonfiction novel—In Cold Blood (1965)—said once in a 1966 interview that the “first essential of the nonfiction novel” is that “there is a timeless quality about the cause and events,” meaning that the novel’s characters, events, and other literary qualities stand the test of time and are just as relevant to readers decades later as they are on the date in which the novel was published.

Consider Capote’s assertion and how it relates to your novel. Then write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies the notion that your novel exhibits this “timeless quality.”

Support your argument with specific details from your nonfiction selection, and from your own reading, observation, or experience.