Truman Capote's arrival in Kansas in late 1959, his curiosity piqued by the slaughter of a family of four, was about as inconspicuous as a spaceship landing. And he was E.T. Cartoonish in his feline effeminacy, the New Yorker writer had Kansans asking, "What's the matter with Truman?" He couldn't have been less like the Plains folks with whom he spent much of the next five years researching the "nonfiction novel" he called In Cold Blood. Yet he had the gift of empathy for turning strangers into intimates. Capote understood wounded people from the inside, for he was one of them.
At first...
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