A nonfiction story that covers the events that took place on November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues, although in the end, the police located the family’s murderers. Originally published in 1965 as a four-part series in the New Yorker magazine, the collection was published as a book in early 1966.
The last book that the author published, he called the genre “New Journalism,” arguably one of the first examples of the modern form of true crime fiction or literary fiction. The book was an instant best seller and caused a lot of controversy. It was banned, but later reinstated after community protests at the Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, GA (2000). The controversy began in early 1999 when a parent complained about sex, violence, and profanity in the book that was part of an Advanced Placement English Class.