Synopsis
Truman Capote's masterpiece, IN COLD BLOOD, a sterling early example of the New Journalism, was part of an evolving genre that filtered events both big and small through the writer's own experiences and feelings. IN COLD BLOOD is the intensely researched story of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and the two men who brutally murdered them on a November night in 1959 for 40 dollars and a radio. Capote spent six years working on the book; his research included not only long stays in Kansas but a sympathetic relationship with Perry Smith, one of the killers. The result, which Capote termed a "nonfiction novel," combined what he knew with what he imagined to present a chilling and vividly documented tale. IN COLD BLOOD was one of the first popular books to look deeply into the mind of a killer, finding both evil and humanity, and has been an important influence on the "true crime" genre that became popular in the years after its publication.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1994-02-01 | | Series: | Vintage International Series | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 343 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.3 oz |
Publisher's Note
With the publication of this book, Capote permanently ripped through the barrier separating crime reportage from serious literature. As he reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, Capote generates suspense and empathy.
Industry Reviews
"IN COLD BLOOD...is a masterpiece--agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy. The tragedy was existential. The murder was seemingly without motive. The killers...almost parodied the literary anti-hero....There are two Truman Capotes. One is the artful charmer, prone to the gossamer and the exquisite....The other, darker and stronger, is the discoverer of death....He has traveled far from the misty, moss-hung Southern-Gothic landscapes of his youth."
New York Times Book Review - Conrad Knickerbocker (01/16/1966)
"[This] is the best documentary account of an American crime ever written, partly IN COLD BLOOD deserves highest marks among American crime histories, it also raises certain questions. What, more or less, is the narrative intended to be: and in what spirit are we supposed to take it? While the book 'reads' like excellent fiction, it purports to be strictly factual and thoroughly documented, but the documentation is, for the most part, suppressed in the text....Whatever its 'genre,' IN COLD BLOOD is admirable: as harrowing as it is, ultimately, though implicitly, reflective in temper...."
New York Review of Books - F.W. Dupee (02/03/1966)
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