In Cold Blood

Use these links to supplement and complement students’ reading of the work and to increase their overall enjoyment of literature. Challenge them to discern parallel themes, engage through visual and aural stimuli, and delve deeper into the thematic possibilities presented by the title.

Recommended Texts for Pairing

The Great Gatsby

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel takes place during the Jazz Age and touches on themes of the accessibility of the American Dream, the inevitability of death, and the search for happiness (i.e., paradise).
• If pressed for time, students can read the final four paragraphs of the novel (or watch the corresponding scene from the 2013 film adaptation), which encapsulates these themes.
• Consider also Nick Carraway’s sympathy for Gatsby alongside Capote’s sympathy for Perry, and whether this sympathy makes one or both of them unreliable narrators.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

• 1751 poem by Thomas Gray, partially quoted in In Cold Blood by Lowell Lee Andrews
• Connects to the theme of mortality, depicting death as a great equalizer
• Consider how In Cold Blood portrays death’s leveling effect and what appeal that effect might have to those who feel “left out” of society.

Marlboro Man advertisement, 1955