In the following essay, Conniff examines In Cold Blood within the context of "prison literature " and looks at the psychological profiles of the characters.
American Prison literature of the past twenty-five years has been preoccupied with a contradiction that is central to the national consciousness. Throughout this period, imprisonment and execution have often risen to the level of obsession; yet such authorized violence has been so normalized that any understanding of it, even in the relatively ' 'safe" realm of literature, has rarely occurred, except through personal tragedy or accident. It is hard to imagine that even Malcolm X, whose Autobiography H. Bruce Franklin considers the starting point of ' 'Contemporary American prison literature", would ever have considered the institutionalized racism of the justice system if he had remained a petty hustler in Detroit. As.....
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