In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder And Its Consequences (Abacus Books) - Softcover

Capote, Truman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349104913 ISBN 13: 9780349104911

Publisher: Penguin, 1987

Synopsis

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories

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.

About this title

Review

'The American dream turning into the American nightmare ... a remarkable book' --Spectator

About the Author

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925 and was raised in various parts of the South, his family spending winters in New Orleans and summers in Alabama and New Georgia. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for the New Yorker which provided his first - and last - regular job. In 1948 his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published to international critical acclaim, assuring Capote a place among the prominent postwar American writers. He died in August 1984.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0349104913
• ISBN 13: 9780349104911
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336