He said at the time that the book scraped him down to the marrow of his bones. It changed him.

Perry didn't want the title to be

It was the most dramatic and probably the most important period in his life, and it changed him radically in all sorts of ways,

That did happen. He may have made a connection with Perry, but Truman was ultimately a writer. A writer trying to get the story.

I don't think Capote loved Smith. But he did make a deep connection. It upset some people, because that had never been the approach to journalistic crime writing, to look into the mind of the killer.

Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously. Journalism was seen as a hack profession that had very little style, very little grace. After In Cold Blood , people saw real-life stories in a different way.