Join us on October 17, 2012 at 5:30 pm for an evening with Dr. Ralph Voss, retired professor
of English at The University of Alabama. Voss will talk about his new book,
Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood (UA Press, 2011).
The talk will be followed by Q&A and a book signing. This event, like all events at Hoole, is free and open to the public. A small exhibit of Capote materials will be on display in the Hoole Lobby.
"Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood is the anatomy of the origins of an American literary landmark and its legacy.
Ralph F. Voss was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in
mid-November of 1959 when four members of the Herbert Clutter family
were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by “four shotgun blasts that, all
told, ended six human lives,” an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm
community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere
could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote’s book–which has never
gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture,
remains required reading in criminology, American Studies,
sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent
biographical films.
Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives,
not only as the crowning achievement of Capote’s career, but also as a
story in itself, focusing on Capote’s artfully composed text, his
extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in
American popular culture.
Voss argues that Capote’s publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of “Southern gothic” fiction; that In Cold Blood
actually is a gothic novel, a sophisticated culmination of Capote’s
artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that
nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also
explores Capote’s famous claim that he created a genre called the
“non-fiction novel,” and its status as a foundational work of “true
crime” writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman
Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt.
Voss also examines Capote’s artful manipulation of the story’s facts
and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance
its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough
to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could
complete it; and Capote’s style, his shaping of the narrative, and his
selection of details–why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices—all despite confident declarations that “every word is true.”
Though it’s been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues
to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic
selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment
and Capote’s own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood’s
ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a
touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization,
and the power of narrative."
