On 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.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. At the center of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.
When Truman Capote serialized In Cold Blood in The New Yorker in autumn 1965,2 no one imagined that his much-heralded "nonfiction novel" was an unpolished work. Yet a comparison of the magazine edition and publication by Random House ten weeks later reveals that Capote made nearly five-thousand changes, ranging from crucial matters of fact to the placement of a comma.
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“It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.”
“As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.”
“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.”
“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”
“I despise people who can't control themselves.”
“It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat.”