Context

With In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, Truman Capote created what he called “a serious new art form: the nonfiction novel.” In 1959, when Capote first started thinking about In Cold Blood, he was already a brilliant fixture of the New York literary scene, author of celebrated short stories, essays, and novels, including the bestselling novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But, according to Capote, he wished to explore journalism as a potential artistic medium by applying his novelistic gifts to a true story—that of a 1959 multiple murder in remote western Kansas, its ramifications, and the psychology of its perpetrators.

By almost any measure, he succeeded: The book, originally published as a wildly popular four-part series in the New Yorker before Random House released it in book form 1966, was met with laudatory reviews and enormous commercial success. With In Cold Blood, Capote limned the dark, violent underbelly of mid-twentieth-century America, chilling and captivating readers with his eloquent and penetrating description of the two murderers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, with whom he corresponded for five years, from the time of their arrest to their execution. He regularly interviewed Smith and Hickock when they were on death row, and developed a fascination with Smith in particular that critics and biographers have speculated went beyond the typical interest a journalist has for his subject.

In Cold Blood is considered to be Capote’s personal masterpiece, as well as a pioneering work of true crime and literary nonfiction. Today, the book remains one of the bestselling true crime books in publishing history.