A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences "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.