88 pages • 2 hours read
Truman CapoteA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.
Short Answer
1. What are the first three or four words, ideas, events, or people you associate with America in the 1950s?
Teaching Suggestion: In Cold Blood takes place during the late 1950s—one of the most mythologized eras of American life. To this day, mentioning the decade tends to evoke images of middle-class prosperity, white picket fences, and cheerful housewives equipped with a variety of new domestic appliances. However, the 1950s were also a period of great tension and turmoil in the form of racial segregation, the Cold War, and the beginnings of what would become the 1960s counterculture. Use students’ responses to tease out these contradictions, which are at the heart of Capote’s exploration of the American Dream’s fragility as well as midcentury norms of masculinity.
2. Can you think of any books that have been banned by either a government or another institutional body (a school, library, etc.)? What do you know about the reasoning behind the banning?
Teaching Suggestion: Parents have sometimes challenged In Cold Blood’s place in school curriculums, citing the work’s violence and sexual content. Despite the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, book banning has a long history in the US. At and around the time of In Cold Blood’s publication, obscenity and sexual explicitness were common concerns, and the government itself sometimes prevented the distribution of works it deemed offensive; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for example, was banned until 1959. More recent examples have mostly taken place at the local level, and the justifications have shifted as well. Race and racism are now frequent concerns, whether because the work uses racial slurs (e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird) or because the work critiques racial inequality in ways that some find offensive (e.g., The Hate U Give’s depiction of the police). Use students’ responses to segue into a conversation about the kinds of content US society finds especially troubling or problematic, and what that reveals about issues like the accessibility of the American Dream or the nature of evil.
Short Activity
Browse a couple of news articles, noticing the style of language the writer(s) use(s). Choose an article about an event that interests you and rewrite it in a less journalistic, more “literary” style.
Teaching Suggestion: In Cold Blood is famous as one of the first (if not the first) “nonfiction novels”: works that employ techniques commonly associated with fiction (e.g., free indirect discourse conveying “characters’” thoughts) to tell a real story. In Cold Blood’s adherence to fact has been a point of controversy, with the style Capote employs adding fuel to the fires of speculation. This activity encourages students to think about how the framing of a story, as much as its content, shapes our understanding of its truth. Nudge students to think not only about the effects different writing styles have on readers, but also about whether different styles tend to convey different “kinds” of truth.
By Truman Capote