In Cold Blood

“The best documentary account of an American crime ever written” (The New York Review of Books), Truman Capote’s masterpiece of narrative nonfiction popularized the genre of true crime as we know it today.

In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.

In Cold Blood created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.”

Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.