Here’s an update from The New Yorker that may be of special interest to you. It introduces a “classic” article written by Truman Capote and published by The New Yorker (September 17, 1965). Click here

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An illustration of a country farmhouse inside a cracked snow globe.

In 1959, the novelist Truman Capote arrived in Holcomb, Kansas—an isolated, wheaty area occasionally referred to as “out there”—to report on the cold-blooded, seemingly random murder of a local family. Afraid to go alone, he had recruited as an assistant his childhood pal Harper Lee, then awaiting the publication of her first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He had asked her to bring a gun. In Holcomb, Capote interviewed residents, investigators, and friends of the slain family.

Capote spent the next six years experimenting with the material, describing his work as a “nonfiction novel.” In 1965, The New Yorker published the result: “In Cold Blood,” a crime series in four parts. In Part 1, the author describes the uncannily sunny last days of the Clutter family, as well as a punishingly long car ride undertaken by their killers, a pair of ex-convicts intent on carrying out the “perfect score.”

“In Cold Blood” caused a sensation, though critics have raised questions over the years about Capote’s unusual style of reporting. (One such skeptic, Norman Mailer, said that a nonfiction novel “sounds like a prescription for some nonspecific disease.”) Still, the potency of Capote’s writing is undeniable; his real-life characters remain as tragically vivid today as sixty years ago. The author renders the doomed Nancy Clutter as a straight-A student who sneakily puffs cigarettes and bites her nails. Her murderers sport an “inky gallery” of tattoos between them, including, near a crucifix, the word “Peace.”

Read the story by clicking here.