When In Cold Blood appeared in four successive issues of The New Yorker magazine in September and October 1965, Truman Capote proposed a new literary form: the “nonfiction novel.” Both its provenance and status as form or genre are contested: Norman Mailer claimed invention of the form, and naturalist genre fiction had probed the lethal aspects of American consciousness since at least the turn of the century. Echoing in tone the stark realism of Steinbeck's fictionalized depiction of Oklahoma in Grapes of Wrath (1939), Capote proffered an equally raw and purportedly nonfiction portrayal of events that occurred in neighboring Kansas exactly twenty years later, replacing Steinbeck's omniscient narrator with a framing literary consciousness, his own. In January 1966, LIFE magazine presented a kind of visual intertext, bridging Capote's novel and the film to come. Featuring photographs by Richard Avedon of the crime location and the killers as they awaited execution in April, the photo-story was the first narrative and visual adaptation of Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas. Just as Capote adapted prior novelistic tropes, so Richard Brooks's 1967 film of In Cold Blood similarly draws upon visual antecedents, notably the work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentarians. Brooks seemed the natural choice for a cinematic realization of Capote's tour de force: a veteran journalist, oft-nominated adapter of literary texts, mercurial director of celebrated films noirs, and a seasoned negotiator of the liminal ground of nonfiction narrative. Both the film and its source text reveal a process of borrowing, including, and excluding—that is, of adaptation—that marked the lives of the protagonists. Brooks's black-and-white wide-screen film blends the FSA visual aesthetic, filtered through Avedon's images, with Capote's text into a cinematic hybrid, a mutation of visual and narrative realism.

The Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) Collection at the Library of Congress contains images captured from 1935 to 1944 by staff who would become some of the most famous mid-century documentary photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. With a mandate to capture the work and impact of Depression-era federal agencies, camera artists were deployed across the country with special attention to rural and economically isolated areas. Kansas images by Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and John Vachon show beneficiaries of FSA funding as well as the impact of the railroad on the rural farmbelt.