Truman Capote gives the reader insight on Perry Smith’s childhood because he wants the reader to become attached to Perry and to feel sorry for him. In a Mexico City hotel room, Perry browses through his personal artifacts and papers. He comes across a letter written by his father on to Perry while at the Kansas State Penitentiary, talking about the events of Perry’s early life. His parents were Tex John Smith and Florence Buckskin, 2 rodeo cowboys. Perry lived an impoverished childhood until his parents’ separation when Perry was six years old. After shortly living with his alcoholic mother, Perry was sent to a Catholic orphanage, where nuns routinely abused him for wetting the bed. After he got pneumonia from this and other things that the nuns did to him, his father took him away to live in Alaska, where he learned to hunt and track, and to search for gold in nearby streams (125-130). Capote is telling the reader this background information because anyone in the world could have had a childhood like Perry Smith. Capote is trying to humanize Perry, to show that Perry could be anyone of the people that we know.  Capote wants the reader to sympathize for Perry and begin to think that if Perry had this or that go differently in his childhood, than none of this would’ve ever happened. Truman Capote gives the reader detailed accounts of Perry’s childhood, in the hope that they will begin to understand Perry’s rough and troubled life up to the atrocious murder.