Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction
books of all time
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.