Truman Capote was born on September 30, 1924 in New Orleans with the name Truman Streckfus Persons and died on August 25, 1948 due to liver failure at the age of 59 (Krebs , 1984). He wrote his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948. He had sympathy for murderers and witnessed executions. In 1965 he published In Cold Blood, but it took him six years to write. While investigating the Clutter murder case, Harper Lee, who was his longtime friend and neighbor, accompanied him to Kansas for two months. He also wrote many other works such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and A Christmas Memory (Biography.com Editors, n.d.). He has been nominated and won a few awards, in 1997 he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor Debut in a Motion Picture - Male, he won a Primetime Emmy in 1967, he won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award in 1962. The book In Cold Blood is about a true story of murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, but Capote decided to make it a non-fiction novel. The members of the Clutter family who were murdered are Herbert Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, Nancy Clutter, and Kenyon Clutter. Only two of the Clutter children survived at the time because they had moved from Holcomb, Kansas. Truman Capote demonstrates in his novel In Cold Blood, how people who commit heinous crimes must have the ability, mentally and emotionally, to carry out their crime. The crimes may not make sense from the victim's perspective, but Capote describes how inevitable the trial seems. Truman Capote does nothing to tone down the horror of the crimes, but makes them even more horrific by illustrating that real killers can stoop and believe their actions can be justified. Truman Capote's main purpose in writing the book was to test the artistic merit of
tags