About this item
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeOn November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged from the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansa. In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.
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. By the age of fourteen he had already started writing short stories, some of which were published. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for the New Yorker which provided his first - and last - regular job. Following his spell with the New Yorker, Capote spent two years on a Louisiana farm where he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) . He lived, at one time or another, in Greece, Italy, Africa and the West Indies, and travelled in Russia and the Orient. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949) , The Grass Harp (1951) , Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) , In Cold Blood (1965) , which immediately became the centre of a storm of controversy on its publication, Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986) , all of which are published by Penguin. Truman Capote died in August 1984.Photo by Jack Mitchell [CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.
