In Cold Blood
1966 non-fiction novel by Truman Capote
In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by the American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 Clutter family murders in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, who were murdered by home intruders during a failed home invasion.
Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and he traveled to Kansas to write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and they interviewed residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested six weeks after the murders and later executed by the state of Kansas. Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book.
In Cold Blood was an instant critical and commercial success. Considered by many to be the prototypical true crime novel, it is also the second-best-selling book in the genre's history, behind Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter (1974) about the Charles Manson murders. Some critics also consider Capote's work the original non-fiction novel, although other writers had already explored the genre, such as Rodolfo Walsh in Operación Masacre (1957). In Cold Blood has been lauded for its eloquent prose, extensive detail, and triple narrative which describes the lives of the murderers, the victims, and other members of the rural community in alternating sequences.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1142887. VIAF identifies the subject as 6571147270566635700007. Authority coordinates are 37.985, -101.000. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1959, 1974 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “In Cold Blood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.