| Truman Capote would have turned a hundred tomorrow, closing out a year in which he reappeared in pop culture as the inspiration for a celebrity-filled TV show from Ryan Murphy. As the author of “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote is rarely out of the Zeitgeist for long, and The New Yorker sparked another resurgence when, in 1997, it assembled an oral history capturing the memories of Capote’s sources, an editor, and friends—along with crime investigators, a death-row chaplain, and more. With “In Cold Blood,” Capote had chronicled the grisly murders of the Clutter family, in rural Kansas, and the violent fate of their killers. He referred to the project, which the magazine published in four groundbreaking installments, in 1965, as a new genre of his devising, a “nonfiction novel” that would change his own life irrevocably. The New Yorker’s oral history is fascinating, whether you’ve read “In Cold Blood” or not. Despite Capote’s long relationship with the magazine, the exchange featured contemporaries who expressed doubts about his methods and ethics, not to mention the veracity of his reporting. A law-enforcement agent suggests that Capote identified deeply with one of the murderers; others recall his extreme agitation on the night they were executed.The figure who emerges is as layered as his work: a fearless “little gnome” who refused to repress his sexual identity, even in the conservative mid-century Midwest, and an outraged opportunist bent on revenge. Unstoppable as he pursued the story of a lifetime, Capote could be steely and ruthless—and then would cry inconsolably for much of the journey home. | 
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