CAPOTE, TRUMAN

In Cold Blood

First edition, first issue of Capote’s masterpiece, a landmark of American literature that transformed literary nonfiction and helped define modern true crime.

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Description

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE. Original cloth, original dust jacket. First issue dust jacket with “1/66” code on the front flap; “Publishers of the American College Dictionary and the Modern Library” on rear flap. A superb copy of Capote’s landmark “nonfiction novel,” one of the defining works of postwar American literature and a book that permanently altered the possibilities of literary journalism.

"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb."

Capote’s masterpiece and the culminating achievement of his career. In Cold Blood grew out of the November 1959 murders of Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and their two children in Holcomb, Kansas. Intrigued by a brief account of the still-unsolved crime in The New York Times, Capote traveled to Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee and spent years interviewing residents, investigators, and, after their arrest, the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. The resulting work combined the methods of reportage with the narrative architecture, characterization, and psychological intimacy of fiction—a form Capote famously called the “nonfiction novel.”

The book appeared first in four installments in The New Yorker in 1965 and was published by Random House the following January. It became an immediate critical and commercial sensation. Although Capote did not invent literary nonfiction, In Cold Blood dramatically expanded its ambitions and audience, becoming a foundational work of the New Journalism and exerting a lasting influence on narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and the modern true-crime genre.

It also marked both the summit and, in an important sense, the turning point of Capote’s literary career. Already celebrated for Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Capote spent nearly six years researching and writing In Cold Blood, investing himself deeply in the lives of its subjects and particularly in Perry Smith. Its extraordinary success made Capote an international celebrity and established the book as the work with which he would be most closely identified. He never again completed a book of comparable scope or ambition; his long-promised Answered Prayers remained unfinished at his death in 1984.

More than half a century after its publication, In Cold Blood remains a touchstone for writers attempting to transform documented events into literature—and a source of continuing debate about the boundaries between fact and reconstruction, the responsibilities of the nonfiction writer toward his subjects, and the uneasy relationship between literary achievement and the representation of real violence.