Cover for author Kim Power's book Capote in Kansas.

The books To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood are monoliths in the publishing and library world. Together they cover all the good and evil our nation has to offer. What most people don’t know, is that the authors of these two books were friends and shared a rocky and strange relationship. Truman Capote and Harper Lee (called Nelle) were childhood friends who played together and made up stories together in the South. Their lives were drawn together as a result of their own oddities and their feeling that they just didn’t fit in.

However, after a falling out, they separated and didn’t speak for 25 years. That is where Kim Powers enters. He imagines what their correspondence could have looked like. Since the two were never normal to begin with, and after being changed from their fame, their ways of being were contaminated with anger, jealousy and misunderstanding. Now, almost 60 both Truman and Nelle face a strange reconciliation.

Both haunted from their experience in Kansas, as Truman gathered information for his novel, In Cold Blood, the ghosts of the past come to haunt. Truman, high on pills and drunk, spends his time writing a novel that amounts to empty pages, is visited by the ghosts of the past. Nelle, with her own set of hauntings, relates her the fear that she has wasted her life and the little talent she acknowledges of her own.

Capote in Kansas is an interesting interpretation of the way genius has a way of causing trouble in its own way. Truman and Nelle were friends and were torn apart by their own ambition and inability to accept their own fame and success. They still wanted to be kids playing in the dirt and imagining the sun. The story jumps around in time and is told from several points of view, explaining the way things were and the reason for how they are now.

The novel is an interesting bookend for the end of a literary era. It started so brightly with so much enthusiasm and ambition and ended so darkly with addiction and insanity. The flow of Powers’ novel follows the rise and fall of the Capote and Harper’s own story. Although it can never be known why Harper Lee never wrote another novel or why Truman Capote couldn’t finish his, the speculation is sometimes more titillating that the truth.

Kim Powers will speak at the Warren County Public Library on Thursday, February 19 at 6:00 p.m.

Kara Ripley is a librarian at the Warren County Public Library in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She earned her BA in English and Philosophy and her Masters in Library Science from Indiana University. Kara lives with her husband Matt, and spends most of her time reading and/or knitting.