A Devil's Bargain: Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and the Frantic Race for the Manson Story
About this ebook
Three years after Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood took the literary world by storm and made Capote a star, another series of murders shook America to its core: the Manson murders. The trial is most famously depicted in Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter—but lesser known are the books that were almost written.
Bugliosi wasn’t the only writer looking to pen the definitive book about the Manson trial. There was Truman Capote himself, who sought to defend his literary territory as America's authority on crime writing; Joan Didion, fresh off the success of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; and several other reporters, hailing from tabloid to underground counterculture publications, hoping to make their mark—and their fortune—by any means necessary. What ensued was a professional race to the top, and—for some—a moral race to the bottom.
A Devil’s Bargain documents that feverish, high-stakes race for the ultimate publishing blood prize, and those willing to give up almost everything—even putting their lives on the line—to pursue it. It’s an origin story of true crime as we know it, and a portrait of an indelible moment in American literary and cultural history.
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About the author
Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and historian. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Columbia Journalism Review, WSJ Magazine, and Vogue, among many other publications. Her previous books include New York Times bestseller Everybody Behaves Badly and Fallout, designated by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 and one of the best books released in the 21st century.
