Background

Born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Capote had a childhood that, by all accounts, was difficult. His mother, a former Miss Alabama who later committed suicide, considered herself temperamentally unsuited to motherhood and sent him off to be raised by relatives in Monroeville, a small Alabama town. When he was four years old, his parents ended their marriage in a bitter divorce: his mother went north to New York, his father south to New Orleans. Truman's mother, meanwhile, had remarried Cuban-born New York businessman Joe Capote, and when, after a series of miscarriages, she realized she could have no more children, she sent for Truman. He was nine years old. Truman was legally adopted by his stepfather.

Education

The young author attended school in Manhattan, then enrolled at Trinity, and, at age thirteen was sent to live at St. John's Academy, a military boarding school.

In fact, Capote's grades were so low that, over the years, his family began to worry that he might be retarded. But when a special group of WPA researchers came to his school to conduct intelligence tests, Capote received the highest score they had ever seen.

In 1939, the Capote family moved to Greenwich and Truman attended Greenwich High School, where he wrote for the school's literary journal, The Green Witch, and the school newspaper. In 1941 they returned to New York City and he attended the Franklin School (nowadays Dwight School). Capote graduated in 1942. That was the end of his formal education.

Career

In place of formal education, Capote substituted experience, landing a job with the New Yorker when he was seventeen years old. It marked the beginning of a long association with the magazine that would serialize his best-known work and, to some extent, shape his writing style. Initially, however, his stories were rejected by the magazine. Instead, he made his first big sale shortly after leaving the New Yorker, when Mademoiselle bought a short story, "Miriam".

"Miriam" caught the attention of Random House editor Robert Linscott, who told Capote that he would be interested in publishing whatever the young author wanted to write. Capote had already begun work on Summer Crossing. He took courage, quit his job, left New York, and settled with relatives in a remote part of Alabama. But, once arrived, Capote began having doubts about his novel. While walking in the woods one afternoon, Capote was seized with a new vision, one inspired by childhood memories. He returned home, tossed the manuscript of Summer Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper and with pathetic optimism, wrote: Other Voices, Other Rooms.

The novel took two years to complete and was published in 1948 to mostly favorable reviews. However, it was the book's packaging rather than its literary merit that titillated the public's attention, for the dust-jacket photo portrayed the twenty-three-year-old author reclining on a couch, looking as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality. In retrospect, Capote was able to identify the book's many autobiographical elements - particularly, as he explained in his 1968 preface, the parallels between protagonist Joel Knox's quest for love and his own search for an "essentially imaginary" father - but he did not make the connection at the time.

After the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote moved for a time to Europe, where he traveled widely with novelist Jack Dunphy. During this ten-year period, which Capote described as the second phase of his development and which ended in 1958, the author experimented with various kinds of writing. There were nonfiction travel essays and portraits such as Local Color and Observations, short story collections A Tree of Night and A Christmas Memory, adaptations of two earlier fictions into the Broadway plays The Grass Harp and House of Flowers, and the scripting of the original films Beat the Devil and The Innocents. His most memorable assignments included a tongue-in-cheek profile of actor Marlon Brando and a wry account of a black theatrical troupe's production of Porgy and Bess in Russia, later published in book form as The Muses Are Heard.

To research his chronicle, Capote had employed neither tape recorder nor note pad, relying instead upon his photographic memory, which he viewed as a journalist's stock-in-trade. He would write up his impressions at the end of the day, but never during an interview, for he felt note-taking put his subjects on guard.

The Muses Are Heard, which was the first book Capote produced using this method. The technique was so successful that it prompted Capote to envision a new kind of novel - something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry. He christened this new genre "the nonfiction novel" and he began looking for a suitable theme.

Before Capote found his subject, he published one more conventional novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, later adapted into a popular film starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Breakfast at Tiffany's is set in Manhattan in 1943. It is a portrait of Holly Golightly, an impulsive, outspoken, young woman who is in some ways worldly - she has no trouble, for example, accepting fifty-dollar bills as "powder room change" from her escorts - but is fundamentally naive. Though Capote conceived of his story as a fiction, he was already drawing heavily from real life incidents.

Capote saw the second phase of his development as a writer come to a close with Breakfast at Tiffany's, and, after its publication, he turned his efforts toward journalism as an art form in itself. He began to search in earnest for a suitable subject, experimenting with several different ideas at this time. One project was a Proustian work, tentatively titled Answered Prayers. Despite his commitment to this project - which he admittedly envisioned as his masterwork - Answered Prayers was "temporarily" shelved when Capote got a brainstorm. One day it suddenly occurred to him that a crime might be an excellent subject to make his big experiment with. On November 16, 1959, Capote found what he had been looking for. Briefly noted in a New York Times wire story was the multiple murder of a wealthy wheat farmer, his wife, and their two teenage children in a small Kansas town.

Three days later, Capote arrived in Holcomb, Kansas, accompanied by his childhood friend Harper Lee, who assisted him with the initial research. The town was in the throes of a brutal unsolved slaying, its residents not only traumatized but also deeply suspicious, and the urbane little dandy from New York City was not well received. Capote recalled that it took about a month for his presence to be accepted and that after the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, were apprehended, people finally began to open up to him. In addition to interviewing the townspeople, murderers, and anyone else even remotely connected to the Clutter case, Capote retraced the killers' flight, journeying south to Miami and Acapulco, renting rooms in the same cheap hotels. He did months of research on the criminal mind and interviewed a number of death row killers. Before he began writing, he had amassed over 6,000 pages of notes. All told, the project, which Capote regarded as the third phase of his writing development, consumed almost six years.

Serialized in the New Yorker in four consecutive issues, In Cold Blood boosted the magazine's sales and netted Capote a rumored $70,000 in serialization rights. New American Library paid a reported $700,000 for paperback rights and Columbia Pictures spent almost a million dollars for filming rights. By 1983, according to the Washington Post, In Cold Blood had brought the author $2 million in royalties. After the book was finished, Capote took a long vacation from writing and resumed his fast-paced social life, hosting a fancy dress ball for 540 friends in November of 1966.

To capitalize on the success of In Cold Blood, Capote's publisher decided to release his story "A Christmas Memory," which had previously appeared in Mademoiselle magazine some ten years earlier, during the holiday season in 1966.

In 1966, Capote had taken a $750,000 writing advance in the form of stocks and was supposed to resume work on Answered Prayers, the nonfiction novel named from a quote by Saint Therese: "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." Instead, Capote wrote in the preface to Music for Chameleons. Finally, in 1972, he resumed work on the book, entering what he viewed as the fourth and final cycle of his writing. He wrote the last chapter first, then produced several more chapters in random order. In 1975 and 1976, four chapters were published in Esquire magazine.

In the work, which Capote likened to a contemporary version of French novelist Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Capote divulges many of the scandalous secrets he had coaxed from his wealthy and powerful friends. The reprisals were swift and immediate. Many of the circles in which Capote had traveled now became closed to him. His telephone calls went unreturned. Invitations fell off. Perhaps the most deeply felt repercussion was the loss of his relationship with Babe Paley, once an almost constant companion and friend.

This social crisis was paralleled by a creative crisis that struck Capote around 1977. Dissatisfied with the texture of his writing, Capote reread every word he had ever published and decided that never, not once in his writing life, had he completely exploded all the energy and esthetic excitements that material contained. Even when it was good.

In 1980 Truman published a collection of stories and portraits, Music for Chameleons, which has as its centerpiece "Handcarved Coffins" - a 30,000-word "nonfiction account of American crime."

Between the appearance of Music for Chameleons in 1980 and the author's death in 1984, Capote wrote some magazine pieces and published One Christmas, a twenty-one-page short story packaged as a book. His personal and health problems persisted, but he spoke frequently of the progress he was making on his masterwork Answered Prayers. After his death, however, such remarks turned out to have been a smokescreen. Except for the portions published in Esquire, no manuscript of Answered Prayers was ever found.

Because Capote had shown bits and pieces of his work in progress to associates and had actually read unpublished passages to friends over the telephone, some people speculate that Capote destroyed what he had written.

A final version of the collected excerpts appeared in 1987 under the title Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. The slim volume contains only the three previously published parts, with chapter titles "Unspoiled Monsters," "Kate McCloud," and "La Côte Basque." The narrator of each is P. B. Jones, a struggling writer, and sometime male prostitute who rises from humble orphan origins in the South to infiltrate the inner circles of the New York social elite.

Achievements

• 

  Truman Capote left a significant imprint in American literature. He created an innovative narrative form of documentary prose. Truman's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks. Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home.
  
  Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's. His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas.
  
  Truman was also a recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1966 and Emmy Award for television adaptation A Christmas Memory in 1967.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Christmas Memory

    (Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by ...)

    1956
  • Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

    (The private letters of Truman Capote, lovingly assembled ...)

    2005
  • Summer Crossing

    (Set in New York during the summer of 1945, this is the st...)

    2005
  • Answered Prayers

    (Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and...)

    1986
  • The Grass Harp

    (Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, The Grass ...)

    1951
  • In Cold Blood

    (On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansa...)

    1965
  • Breakfast at Tiffany's

    (In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote cre...)

    1958
  • Music For Chameleons

    (In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stori...)

    1980
  • Portraits and Observations

    (Portraits and Observations is the first volume devoted so...)

    2007
  • Other Voices, Other Rooms

    (At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the f...)

    1948

Religion

In the letter to Perry Smith Truman Capote wrote: "Anyway, I belong to no churches and am not a "Believer" in any formal sense. At one time I was very interested in Oriental religions, and felt, and still somewhat feel, that it might be possible for me to accept Buddhism, perhaps because it is really more a [unclear] than a religion."

Politics

Truman Capote claimed he had never voted in his life, but was on good personal terms with a friend and hotel roommate Adlai Stevenson. In 1968 he said in an interview, "I have never considered myself right, left or center. On some issues, such as law enforcement, I do sound like a Birchite: and on others, more like Fidel Castro after two quarts of Appleton’s rum."

Views

Although Capote never fully embraced the gay rights movement, due to his own openness about homosexuality and his encouragement for openness in others he was an important player in the realm of gay rights.

Quotations: "Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."

"I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it."

"I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

Membership

Truman Capote was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Personality

Throughout his career, Truman Capote remained one of America’s most controversial and colorful authors, combining literary genius with a penchant for the glittering world of high society. His insight into the psychology of human desire was extraordinary. He was ambitious and occasionally vain, but determined. Capote invested in increasing literary and public reputation, and he was not shy when it comes to showing off his talents.

Capote was well known for his distinctive, high-pitched voice and odd vocal mannerisms, his offbeat manner of dress, and his fabrications. He was acquainted with authors, critics, business tycoons, philanthropists, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty, and members of high society, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Physical Characteristics: Truman Capote height was 5 feet 3 inches, or in metric units - 160 centimetres. He had brown hair and brown eyes.

Quotes from others about the person

• Jeff Solomon: "When Capote confronts the Trillings on the train, he attacks their identity as literary and social critics committed to literature as a tool for social justice, capable of questioning both their own and their society's preconceptions, and sensitive to prejudice by virtue of their heritage and, in Diana's case, by her gender."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Andy Warhol

• Writers

  Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, and Marcel Proust

• Music & Bands

  David Bowie

Connections

Truman Capote did not hide his sexual orientation and was openly homosexual. For this reason, the man did not have a wife and children. One of his first serious lovers was Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin. But the main person in the life of Capote was the writer Jack Dunphy, whom he met in 1948. The men were together for 35 years and broke up on the initiative of Jack, who was tired of putting up with his partner’s addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Father:

Archulus Persons

Mother:

Lillie Mae Faulk

Friend:

Marilyn Monroe

Partner:

Jack Dunphy

John Paul Dunphy was an American novelist and playwright.

Friend:

Harper Lee

Friend:

Elizabeth Taylor

Friend:

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

References

• Capote: A Biography
  1988
• Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction
  1992
• Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career
  1997