Home > In Cold Blood Summary & Study Guide

In Cold Blood | Introduction

In Cold Blood, published in 1965, was first serialized in the New Yorker in four installments. It was an instant critical and commercial success, bringing Truman Capote both literary recognition and celebrity status. With its publication, Capote claimed to have invented a new genre, the ''nonfiction novel,'' and critics quickly accepted his classification, his methods, and his purpose as a new combination of journalism and fiction. He wanted to merge the two—enlivening what he saw as stagnant prose conforming to stale, rigid standards—and he wished to experiment with documentary methods. The Clutter murders were the perfect vehicle for this monumental experiment in reportage.

In Cold Blood painstakingly details, in four parts, the Clutter family's character, activities, and community status during the last days before their murder; the planning and machinations of the killers; the investigative dedication of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agents; and the capture, trial, and execution of the murderers. While the book portrays the Clutters sympathetically, it also concentrates the reader's sympathies on Perry Smith, who, abused and abandoned as a child and scorned as an adult, allegedly commits all four murders. In framing the question of nature versus nurture, Capote's tightly documented, evocatively written account of the Clutter killings asks whether a man alone can be held responsible for his action when his environment has relentlessly neglected him.

In Cold Blood Summary

The first part of In Cold Blood establishes the Clutter family and the duo of Hickock and Smith on two different, but inevitably intersecting, paths. In the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, the Clutter family's activities are ill-fated: Herb Clutter, the father, takes out a forty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, and the family does not lock the doors to their house. Each member of the family residing in the palatial house at the center of the successful River Valley Farm is painted with delicate, exacting strokes. Kenyon is a boy's boy, not interested in girls yet at fifteen-years-of-age, but a talented carpenter and fisherman nonetheless. Nancy is the town sweetheart, helpful, generous, attractive, and accomplished. She is dating Bobby Rupp, the school basketball star, who is also the last to see the family alive. Perhaps the most tragic member is Bonnie Clutter, the mother, who has been afflicted with a nervous disorder that keeps her confined to... » Complete In Cold Blood Summary