Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss (review)

No book-length analysis has emerged regarding Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood until now. Ralph F. Voss, a native Kansan and retired professor of English, takes as his subjects Capote and his 1966 text in Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood. Only a high school junior when four Kansans were shotgunned to death in their home, Voss provides an intricate evaluation of this seminal American text and its lasting effects. Rather than focus on one textual or social matter, Voss provides an extensive investigation into the various artistic, social, mythical and historical effects wrought by Capote’s book, resulting in a complete cultural overview. Though Voss cuts a wide swath, his approach allows for students not only of Capote and his text, but readers of any background, to engage with and understand the degree to which In Cold Blood changed the American literary establishment and American culture itself. It is here that Voss makes his mark, as he resurrects Truman Capote and In Cold Blood for a new generation of readers.

Much has been written regarding the various stages of Truman Capote’s fascinating career, both socially and artistically. Gerald Clarke’s definitive biography (Capote: A Biography, 1988) covers in detail the peaks and valleys of one of America’s most successful and misunderstood literary artists, as does George Plimpton’s oral biography, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (1997). Academic scholarship centers squarely on In Cold Blood, the 1966 “nonfiction” account of a quadruple murder in Holcomb, Kansas, with various pieces covering several aspects of the text’s ingenuity. Hailed as the first “nonfiction novel” and predecessor to both New Journalism and the true crime genre, In Cold Blood manages to complicate an array of analytical perspectives, ranging from queer theory to textuality to psychoanalysis. Indeed, the MLA International Bibliography lists seventy-one notes, articles and book chapters regarding the text and its author, with no other major work receiving more than sixteen. Further, while scholars have ordained the text as Capote’s magnum opus, subsequent film adaptations of the work (and its creation) have permeated the American marketplace, including Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967), Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005) and Douglas McGrath’s Infamous (2006), again establishing the text as central in both literary and filmic arenas. As a central American text, In Cold Blood has had (and continues to have) a profound effect on the American zeitgeist not only of the 1960s, but on the present day.

Voss’s attention to these cultural effects allows for an updated understanding of the text itself, as he dutifully addresses several aspects of In Cold Blood’s infamous existence. His approach, both studied and effective, combines “Capote’s ruinous celebrity, yoked with the resonance of his crime and punishment story, [resulting] in several ongoing cultural legacies.” Voss suggests that not only the text itself, but its varying creative descendants, “bear testimony to the wide cultural influence the book and its creator have had” (15). Such an approach fits the expectancy of In Cold Blood’s first book-length study, as Voss leaves little out in his carefully researched and altogether straight-forward literary/cultural criticism. He is especially successful in condensing the enormous amount of historical information about Capote and his work early on, with excellent chapters on his celebrity, Southern Gothicism, and style. Voss hinges Capote’s legacy on In Cold Blood, the author’s ultimate axis, calling it “the culminating triumph of Truman Capote’s gothic vision, the book that moved him from the secondary ranks among Southern writers of gothic fiction to the front ranks of serious American writers of nonfiction” (49). Here Voss presents his continued paradoxical look into Truman Capote and his work, how one author could both change and be changed by cultural expectancy, literary encumbrance and popular culture itself. From his celebrity and literary abilities came...