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Cover of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

  • 352 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 1965
  • 121 editions
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1 About this book

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by the American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 Clutter family murders in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, who were murdered by home intruders during a failed home invasion.

Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and he traveled to Kansas to write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and they interviewed residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested six weeks after the murders and later executed by the state of Kansas. Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book.

In Cold Blood was an instant critical and commercial success.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • Crime
  • Murder
  • Mystery
  • True Crime
  • Coming of age
  • Humor
  • Cas, Études de
  • Criminal investigation, united states

2 What to expect

The account of the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and of the two men who did it, written with the techniques of a novel. Capote moves between the victims, the town, the investigators and the murderers, whose lives he studies closely, and the result is as much a portrait of them as a crime story. The prose is calm and detailed, the crime is described plainly, and how far Capote shaped the facts has long been debated.

Good for readers who want: classic true crime, literary nonfiction, and a close study of two murderers.

3 About Truman Capote

1924–1984

Truman Garcia Capote (ka-POH-teh; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, and he is regarded as one of the founders of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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