In Cold Blood

"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.

• The Merchant of Venice (Folger Shakespeare Library)
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Fall
• The Ethics of Authenticity
• The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)
• GradeSaver (TM) ClassicNotes: In Cold Blood Study Guide
• Hiroshima
• Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University
• The Merchant of Venice (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Death of a Salesman (Penguin Plays)