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Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965.
The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the "new journalism." Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. "I thought he was a very nice gentleman," he says of Herb Clutter. "Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers' flight, Capote's account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.
What book have you read that’s set in or near your hometown?
...w live in a tiny community a few miles from Dodge City. 60 miles to the west is Holcomb, Kansas, site of the Clutter murders which were the basis for In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Dodge City though, is world famous on its own as the Cowboy Capital of the World, and in the 1870s as the Queen of the Cowtowns, and the Wickedest L...
-Lana_Maskus
Name three nonfiction books you absolutely loved and would recommend
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; John Adams by David McCullough; Wild Swans by June Chang.
-Vivian_H
"A remarkable, tensely exciting, superbly written 'true account.' " —The New York Times
"The best documentary account of an American crime ever written ... The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence ... harrowing." —The New York Review of Books
This information about In Cold Blood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Truman Capote was born September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. After his parents' divorce, he was sent to live with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. It was here he would meet his lifelong friend, the author Harper Lee. Capote rose to international prominence in 1948 with the publication of his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Among his celebrated works are Breakfast at Tiffany's, A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, Summer Crossing, A Christmas Memory, and In Cold Blood, widely considered one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Twice awarded the O. Henry Short Story Prize, Capote was also the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award and an Edgar Award. He died August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.
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