In Cold Blood.

CAPOTE, Truman .

Item Number: 140605

New York: Random House, 1965.

First edition of Capote’s landmark true-crime novel. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, signed by the author, “with love from Truman.” From the library of his editor at Random House Joseph Fox. Fox was a well-loved figure at Random House, where he spent 35 years editing some of the house’s star writers, among them Truman Capote, Fran Lebowitz, John Irving, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, Anthony Lewis, Peter Matthiessen, Mark Salzman and Martin Cruz Smith. “He was an absolutely assiduous line editor,” wrote Smith, who worked on five books with Mr. Fox. “He would simply take my sentences and push in an arm here and pull a knee over here. And when the sentences stood up, they stood up straighter. He took such infinite care over every word. He tried to get the rhythm of each individual writer, like he was learning a musical score.” Fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by S. Neil Fujita. A fine association.

"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. In Cold Blood established Capote as the "herald of a new genre, ‘the non-fiction novel,’ which recognizes the convergence of fiction and fact in times of outrage, the insane surrealism of daily life" (Hart, 122; Allen, 247). "The best documentary account of an American crime ever written. . . . The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence . . . harrowing" (The New York Review of Books). The book was adapted into a film of the same name 1967 and again in 2005 as the biographical portrait, Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his outstanding performance.