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In Cold Blood

Matt Wavrin
WRT 102 (R. Brodesky)
December 2, 2005

Justice Inversion

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is a reminder that our criminal process, including the controversy over the death penalty, is still debated to this day, some 46 years after the Clutter murders took place in the tiny town of Holcomb, Kansas. "In Cold Blood" took an exhausting six years for Capote to write and research; it was the birth of his career just as certainly as it was the death of it. In the process, the communities of Holcomb and Garden City were changed forever, and a new age of writing was developed.
Capote created a stir from the moment he was thrust into the literary world. His first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," about a boy's sexual identity in the South, included a photo of the author as widely discussed as the book itself, though Capote couldn't understand why:
"…the picture's perfectly harmless. It's just me lying on the sofa looking at the camera. But I guess it assumes that I'm lying on the sofa and more or less beckoning somebody to climb on top of me." (Grobel 39)
"Other Voices" put Capote into the public consciousness, and his integration into high society would inspire one of his most popular works, the novella "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Later turned into a film, Capote openly derided the decision to cast Audrey Hepburn as his heroine, Holly Golightly (he would've preferred Marilyn Monroe) and was furious over the alteration of his ending, just one of many examples of Capote's frank nature that both endeared and irritated in equal measure.
Although his newfound fame could've easily cemented his status as a master in the realm of fiction, Capote had other plans in mind, wanting to test his limits as a writer.
"I didn't choose the subject because of any great interest in it. It was because I wanted to write what I called a nonfiction novel—a book that would read exactly like a novel except every word of it would be absolutely true." (Grobel 112)
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