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...November night in 1959 two ex-convicts named Perry Smith and Richard Hickock entered the Holcomb, Kans., home of Herbert Clutter, a well-to-do wheat farmer, and killed everyone in it: Clutter, his wife, his 16-year-old daughter and his 15-year-old son. Murder was only incidental to the design, which was theft. But murder was also essential: the visitors intended to leave no witnesses. Within two months the killers, who had collected a tabletop radio, binoculars, and less than $50 in cash from their victims, were captured and condemned to death. Last April, after five years...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Country Below the Surface | 1/21/1966 | See Source »

...capitalizing on the results of that lack, bear in mind that it was the most extreme test of his objectivity. As a friend of the killers he suffered privately and had their graves marked; as artist and craftsman he raised a public monument to the questions posed by the Clutter affair...

Author: By John C. Diamante, | Title: Capote's Non-Fiction Novel | 1/14/1966 | See Source »

...central impact of the mass murder lies in a double mischance; first, that Hickock and Smith should ever have found one another, each being the perfect complement in a mutuality predicated on a "big score"; second, that the Clutter family should have been chosen as victims, so incongruous a happening that it made Holcomb, Kansas, feel "like being told there...

Author: By John C. Diamante, | Title: Capote's Non-Fiction Novel | 1/14/1966 | See Source »

...Cold Blood is a minor national epic, illuminating many affecting portraits--allowing to share young Nancy Clutter's poignant diary: "Summer here. Forever I hope"; to witness the shock of her boyfriend's agony, by which an adolescent learns adult numbness; to be harassed by the posturing gruffness of Holcomb's postmistress: ". . . the sane thing to do is to shut up. You live until you die and it doesn't matter how you go--dead's dead": to appreciate Mr. Clutter's Midwest-pastoral dream: "an apple-scented Eden"; to wince before the senior Hickock's A History...

Author: By John C. Diamante, | Title: Capote's Non-Fiction Novel | 1/14/1966 | See Source »

Against this backdrop moves the spirit apostrophized in Perry's diary: "What is life? . . . It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." For Capote, the movements in the shadows that produced the lightning tragedy of the Clutter murder are the tremors of a nation. Smith and Hickock are neither judged for what they did, nor vulgarly presented as anti-heroes. With courageous and incisive honesty Capote focuses on the dynamics of the two personalities, but never lets the tensions and momentum of the killers' relationship obscure the outward drama their characters...

Author: By John C. Diamante, | Title: Capote's Non-Fiction Novel | 1/14/1966 | See Source »

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