Item #410 In Cold Blood. Truman Capote.

In Cold Blood

“And so it happened that in the daylight hours of that Wednesday morning, Alvin Dewey, breakfasting in the coffee shop of a Topeka hotel, read, on the first page of the Kansas City Star, a headline he had long awaited: Die on Rope for Bloody Crime. The story, written by an Associated Press reporter, began: ‘Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, partners in crime, died on the gallows at the state prison early today for one of the bloodiest murders in Kansas criminal annals. Hickock, 33 years old, died first, at 12:41 A.M.; Smith, 36, died at 1:19...’”

FIRST EDITION of Capote's masterpiece, SIGNED BY CAPOTE on half-title.

"One of the more distinguished achievements in reportage by any writer, In Cold Blood first appeared serially in the New Yorker, where it examined with extraordinary depth, precision, and drama the victims and their killers. So immense was the stress of the editorial undertaking, however, that Capote became addicted to tranquilizers and developed an emotional attachment to the criminals, whose deaths by hanging he witnessed at the Kansas state penitentiary. From more than four thousand pages of typewritten notes gathered with Harper Lee, Capote's celebrated 'non-fiction novel' won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award and exacted enough of a psychological toll upon its author to preclude much sustained work in the future" (American National Biography).

New York: Random House, [1965]. Octavo, original maroon cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket with a little bit of toning to spine, otherwise fine.

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