Truman Capote Nonfiction Novel

About Capote

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) is the founding text of the 'nonfiction novel' — a genre-defining reconstruction of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, by two drifters, drawn from six years of research and correspondence on death row. Capote, who traveled to Holcomb with Harper Lee immediately after reading the news item, developed a personal relationship with Perry Smith that shaped the book's deep psychological sympathy for the killers and generated the most debated author-subject relationship in American nonfiction. In Cold Blood created the modern true crime genre and remains its most artistically serious achievement. Capote's earlier fiction — Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) — shows the Gothic and comic Southern traditions he was working within before the nonfiction novel consumed his creative life.