Name:______Date:______Block:______

In Cold Blood Guided Notes

Truman Capote . Born in New Orleans, ______. He was an only child. His parents were ______when he was four. . Capote’s mother went to ______, leaving Truman behind with the ______family in Alabama. Ten years later she sent for Truman. . He was often left alone in a ______hotel room by his mother, who was unhappy, insecure, and who eventually committed ______when Truman was 29. . All his life, Capote felt that he was unloved and ______by his mother. . Capote was a very lonely boy as a youngster, always feeling ______from others. . His only friends as a youth: a group of black children who lived in his town, ______, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, and Miss Sook Faulk, an elderly cousin, who spent much time with him. . In high school, Truman was befriended by an English teacher who ______him to write. . He started sending in stories for ______when he was 15 years old. . He eventually went to work for the ______Magazine, working in the Accounting and Art Departments. . Then he started writing a ______called: “The Talk of the Town.” . When he was seventeen, he ______his first stories. . At nineteen, he won the ______Prize for the short story, “Miriam.” . He worked at the New Yorker for two years, and then set out on his own as a ______. . He left for ______to live and write. . He published Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first ______, at age 24. . He achieved overnight success and was a ______. . Throughout the 50’s, he published other highly regarded works: The Muses Are Heard, and ______. . Then in 1959, he decided he wanted to expand journalistic reporting into something more meaningful, to create a work which combined ______and fiction. Writes . One evening in November, 1959, as Truman was reading the ______, he noticed a headline: “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” . He read the story which briefly stated that Herbert Clutter, a wheat and cattle rancher, his wife and their teenaged son and daughter had been ______in their home in Holcomb, a suburb of Garden City, . . Soon after reading the account, Capote decided that the story of the ______was what he had been searching for, a ______that would enable him to write a book which would endure.

In Cold Blood – Characters Alvin Dewey . Alvin Dewey – Chief ______in the Clutter Case. Member of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. . He was “real fond of Herb and Bonnie Clutter.” He told Capote: “I’ve seen some bad things, I sure as hell have, but nothing as ______as this.” . With no solid clues to go on, Dewey became so distraught and obsessed by the nearly clueless crime, which went unsolved for six weeks, that he later suffered a ______. Herbert Clutter . A prosperous owner of the ______Farm; 48 years old in 1959. . His farm included a 60 thousand dollar house he ______himself, surrounded by 800 acres of wheat, milo and grass seed, plus 3000 rented acres. . He was one of the most ______wheat growers in all of Kansas. . He was on ______Eisenhower’s Federal Farm Credit Bureau during the 50’s. . Bonnie, his wife, once said about him: “he was handsome, he was ______, he was strong-willed.” Bonne Clutter . Herb’s wife. . Bonnie had for years suffered from spells of ______and seizures of grief. . She tended to stay in her married daughter’s ______by herself all day, and was heard crying quite often behind the closed door. . She had been married to Herb 25 years when she was ______. . Once she said: “Mr. Clutter travels a great deal. Oh, he’s always headed somewhere… sometimes it seems like he’s never ______…” Nancy Clutter . Herb and Bonnie’s 16 year old daughter. . A friend of hers said she “always made people feel ______about themselves.” . She was a straight-A student, ______, a leader in the 4-H program and the Young Methodists League. . She was a skilled rider, an excellent ______…”an annual winner at the county fair.” . She kept a ______in varying handwriting styles, and worried, “Which is me?” Kenyon Clutter . Herb and Bonnie’s 15 year old son. . He was a source of great ______to his father, who said, “right now he kind of leans toward being an engineer, or a scientist, but you can’t tell me my boy’s not a born rancher.” . He was not much interested in ______life, and “could not conceive of ever wanting to waste an hour on any girl that might be spent with guns, horses, tools …even a book.” The Killers - Perry Smith and Dick Hickock . They met in ______. . Dick was the son of an ______but poor farm couple in Olathe, Kansas. . He earned A’s in several high school subjects, along with ______for baseball, basketball, and football. . Hickock’s face, Capote wrote, “seemed composed of ______parts…as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center…the eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine with a venomous, sickly-blue squint that…seemed…to warn of bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature.” . Perry Smith, the one who ______, had a “changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic. . He strutted “on stunted legs that seemed grotesquely ______to the grown- up bulk they supported.” . He appeared “not like a well-built truck driver but like a retired ______, overblown and muscle-bound.” . Both killers were heavily ______.

Structure of the Novel . There are 4 parts or sections; each is titled. . Part One – “The Last to See Them Alive” . Includes descriptions of what the Clutters did on their ______day alive, and the slow ______of the killers as they travel the 400 miles to River Valley Farm . Part Two – “Persons Unknown” . The ______begins, the Clutters are buried, and the killers flee to Mexico . Part Three – “Answer” . The killers are pursued and finally ______; Perry describes what happened in the house that night. . Part Four – “The Corner” . Includes descriptions of the ______of the killers, testimonies, legal skirmishes, psychiatric testing; Capote also describes the crimes of some of the other killers on Death Row, and then finally, the ______of the two killers.