|
Truman
Capote was born in New
Orleans in 1924 to a troubled family. His
mother, Lille Mae, was too childish to handle the responsibilities
of motherhood and he rarely saw his father, Archulus Persons, a
clerk for a steamboat company.
When
he was four years old, his parents divorced. At that time, his
mother left him with relatives in Monroeville,
Alabama while she made a life for herself in
New York. Truman’s years in Alabama would
later became the material for some of his most sentimental, loving
characters, especially the elderly spinster in several of Capote's
novels, stories, and plays.
Lille Mae remarried, this time to a
wealthy Cuban businessman named Joseph Capote, and Truman left his
life in the South to live with his mother and new stepfather in
New York. Joseph Capote adopted young Truman
changing his name to Truman Capote.
Capote began writing stories when he was eight
years old. He attended
Trinity
School
and
St. John's
Academy
in
New York,
and the public schools of
Greenwich,
Connecticut,
but his formal education stopped there. At seventeen he began
working at the
The New Yorker. He attracted as much attention with his attire
as he did his writing.
In
1946 he won the
O. Henry
Award for his short stories. His first
novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
was published in 1948. Critics were quick to categorize him as a
Southern Gothic Writer due to his rich style and dark psychological
themes, but Capote proved to be far more complex a writer. In his
later works, his tone is humorous, light, with a touch of
sentiment.
It is interesting to note that childhood friend,
Harper
Lee, portrayed Capote as Dill in her famous novel
To Kill a
Mockingbird. "Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts
that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his
head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over
him."
In the
1950s Capote wrote
The House of Flowers, a musical set in
a West Indies bordello.
The following year, in 1951, he published
The Grass Harp.
In 1958, Capote
wrote one of his most famous works,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
With his increasing interest in
New Journalism and what he called the “nonfiction novel” Capote
wrote his bestseller
In Cold Blood. After the publication of
In Cold Blood, he switches gears completely writing
A
Christmas Memory, a sentimental Christmas story based on his
upbringing in the South came out in 1956. He began writing
Answered Prayers but it remained unfinished. Three stories from
the novel appeared in
Esquire in the 1970s, and the surviving
portions were republished in 1986. In 1981, he published
Music
for Chameleons, a collection of short pieces, stories,
interviews, and conversations published in various magazines.
While
living in
Los Angeles, Capote died in 1984 of liver
disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. A
lot has been written
about Truman Capote’s life.
~ ~ ~
You may also be
interested in subscribing to
The New Yorker, still a great
source for new fiction:
|
Use
to find first
editions
and signed works by
Capote! |
