Tuman Capote

The author of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), Truman Capote was a successful writer whose flamboyant public persona sometimes overshadowed his literary reputation. He spent most of his early years in Monroeville, Alabama, then moved to New York City in 1933. Capote dropped out of school and went to work in the offices of The New Yorker while writing stories for other publications. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), was a critical hit and Capote quickly became a star among New York's literati. During the 1960s he enjoyed both literary success and regular media attention, earning a reputation as a gossip-mongering partygoer with a quick and barbed wit. The international success of In Cold Blood furthered his celebrity and made him rich. Capote became a familiar face on TV (especially on Johnny Carson's show), instantly recognized for his diminutive frame and languid, lisping speech. By the end of the 1970s his health deteriorated due to alcohol and drug abuse, and he had worn out his welcome as the enfant terrible of New York's elite. Capote wrote essays, novels, stories and screenplays, and adapted some of his works for television and the stage. His books include The Grass Harp (1951), The Muses Are Heard (1956) and Music For Chameleons (1980).

In the last years of his life, Capote lived for months at a time in the house of Johnny Carson's ex-wife, Joanne; in 2006 she held an auction of left-behind Capote memorabilia... In 2004 his unpublished first novel, Summer Crossing, was discovered; the work, long thought to have been destroyed, was published in 2005... Capote was sometimes called "the tiny terror"... The Broadway play Tru (1989-90) was based on Capote's life... Capote was a childhood friend of Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird (1960); the character Dill is said to have been modeled on Capote... Capote is said to have dismissed the works of Beat authors such as Jack Kerouac with the comment, "That's not writing, it's typing."

Truman Capote (1924-1984) was one the most famous and controversial figures in contemporary American literature. The ornate style and dark psychological themes of his early fiction caused reviewers to categorize him as a Southern Gothic writer. However, other works display a humorous and sentimental tone. As Capote matured, he became a leading practitioner of "New Journalism," popularizing a genre that he called the nonfiction novel.

Because of his celebrity, virtually every aspect of Capote's life became public knowledge, including the details of his troubled childhood. Born in New Orleans, he seldom saw his father, Archulus Persons, and his memories of his mother, Lillie Mae Faulk, mainly involved emotional neglect. When he was four years old his parents divorced, and afterward Lillie Mae boarded her son with various relatives in the South while she began a new life in New York with her second husband, Cuban businessman Joseph Capote. The young Capote lived with elderly relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, and he later recalled the loneliness and boredom he experienced during this time. His unhappiness was assuaged somewhat by his friendships with his great-aunt Sook Faulk, who appears as Cousin Sook in his novellas A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967), and Harper Lee, a childhood friend who served as the model for Idabel Thompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Lee, in turn, paid tribute to Capote by depicting him as the character Dill Harris in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). When Capote was nine years old, his mother, having failed to conceive a child with her second husband, brought her son to live with them in Manhattan, although she still sent him to the South in the summer. Capote did poorly in school, causing his parents and teachers to suspect that he was of subnormal intelligence; a series of psychological tests, however, proved that he possessed an I.Q. well above the genius level. To combat his loneliness and sense of displacement, he developed a flamboyant personality that played a significant role in establishing his celebrity status as an adult.

Capote had begun secretly to write at an early age, and rather than attend college after completing high school, he pursued a literary apprenticeship that included various positions at The New Yorker and led to important social contacts in New York City. Renowned for his cunning wit and penchant for gossip, Capote later became a popular guest on television talk shows as well as the frequent focus of feature articles. He befriended many members of high society and was as well known for his eccentric, sometimes scandalous behavior as he was for his writings.

Capote's first short stories, published in national magazines when he was seventeen, eventually led to a contract to write his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Set in the South, the novel centers on a young man's search for his father and his loss of innocence as he passes into manhood. The work displays many elements of the grotesque: the boy is introduced to the violence of murder and rape, he witnesses a homosexual encounter, and at the novel's end, his failure to initiate a heterosexual relationship with Idabel Thompkins, his tomboy companion, leads him to accept a homosexual arrangement with his elder cousin Randolph, a lecherous transvestite. Each of these sinister scenes is distorted beyond reality, resulting in a surreal, nightmarish quality. Despite occasional critical complaints that the novel lacks reference to the real world, Other Voices, Other Rooms achieved immediate notoriety. This success was partly due to its strange, lyrical evocation of life in a small Southern town as well as to the author's frank treatment of his thirteen-year-old protagonist's awakening homosexuality. The book's dust jacket featured a photograph of Capote, who was then twenty-three, reclining on a couch. Many critics and readers found the picture erotically suggestive and inferred that the novel was autobiographical.

Many of Capote's early stories, written when he was in his teens and early twenties, are collected in A Tree of Night and Other Stories. These pieces show the influence of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, all of whom are associated to some degree with a Gothic tradition in American literature. Like these authors, as well as the Southern Gothic writers Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, with whom critics most often compare him, Capote filled his stories with grotesque incidents and characters who suffer from mental and physical abnormalities. Yet Capote did not always use the South as a setting, and the Gothic elements in some of the tales are offset by Capote's humorous tone in others. Critics often place his early fiction