In Cold Blood

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. 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.

Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, <b>Other Voices, Other Rooms</b>, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America's postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (<b>A Tree of Night</b>, among others), novels and novellas (<b>The Grass Harp</b> and <b>Breakfast at Tiffany's</b>), some of the best travel writing of our time (<b>Local Color</b>), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in <b>The New Yorker</b> (<b>The Duke in His Domain</b> and <b>The Muses Are Heard</b>), a true-crime masterpiece (<b>In Cold Blood</b>), several short memiors about his childhood in the