Review of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
People are capable of just about anything, it would seem, even in America's heartland, based on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966). The author chose his title well because people who are "cold-blooded" act "without consideration, compunction, or clemency" (Cold-blooded, 2006), and the men who committed the murders in Kansas in 1959 that are the subject of this book were certainly that by any measure. For example, one authority emphasizes that, "Capote weaved a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder, an act they never would have been capable of individually. Capote's book also details the lives of the victims and the effect the crime had on the rural community where they lived" (In Cold Blood, 2006, p. 5). The subjects of the book, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were two young ex-convicts who were captured in Las Vegas and returned to the Kansas town where they committed the four murders of the Clutter family during a robbery attempt that had gone horribly wrong. The defendants were later found guilty at their trial and were condemned to die by hanging; although
While Wikipedia notes that Capote maintained he had invented a new type of book ("the non-fiction novel") with In Cold Blood by using applying traditional literary conventions to crime reporting, others remain unconvinced that Capote actually invented this type of novel (In Cold Blood, 2006). In the final analysis, the book is a chilling account of some truly "cold-blooded" murders by any measure and should probably not be read by younger readers, but more mature readers will likely enjoy it and will be as shocked at Capote's account of the Clutter family murders today as the public was when the book was released 40 years ago (the movie was good too). their original execution date was postponed, they were finally hung by the State of Kansas for the murders of the Clutter family in April 1965 after their appeals had been exhausted. Following the trial of Hickock and Smith, Capote traveled to Europe and wrote In Cold Blood (Bowman, 2002), which represented a new type of novel by a homosexual author at the time and these issues are discussed further below. Whenever innocent people die, it is big news of course. The
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Approximate Word count = 761
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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