American author (1924–1984)
Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, and he is regarded as one of the founders of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe. His work and his life story have been adapted into and have been the subject of more than 20 films and television productions.
Capote had a troubled childhood caused by his parents' divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple moves. He was planning to become a writer by the time he was eight years old, and he honed his writing ability throughout his childhood. He began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of "Miriam" (1945) attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf and resulted in a contract to write the novel "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948). He achieved widespread acclaim with "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1958)—a novella about a fictional New York café society girl named Holly Golightly, and the true crime novel "In Cold Blood" (1966)—a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home. Capote spent six years writing the latter, aided by his lifelong friend Harper Lee, who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960).
Early life.
Truman Capote was born at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Lillie Mae Faulk (1905–1954) and salesman Archulus Persons (1897–1981). He was sent to Monroeville, Alabama, where, for the following four to five years, he was raised by his mother's relatives. He formed a fast bond with his mother's distant relative, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom Truman called "Sook". "Her face is remarkable – not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind", is how Capote described Sook in "A Christmas Memory" (1956). In Monroeville, Capote was a neighbor and friend of Harper Lee, who would also go on to become an acclaimed author and a lifelong friend of Capote's. Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" likely models Dill's characterization upon Capote.
As a lonely child, Capote taught himself to read and write before he entered his first year of school. Capote was often seen at age five carrying his dictionary and notepad, and began writing fiction at age 11. He was given the nickname "Bulldog" around this age.
On Saturdays, he made trips from Monroeville to the nearby city of Mobile on the Gulf Coast, and at one point submitted a short story, "Old Mrs. Busybody", to a children's writing contest sponsored by the "Mobile Press Register". Capote received recognition for his early work from The Scholastic Art &amp; Writing Awards in 1936.
In 1932, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, José García Capote. José was a former Spanish colonel who became a landlord at Union de Reyes, Cuba.
Of his early days, Capote related, "I was writing really sort of serious when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it." In 1932, he attended the Trinity School in New York City. He then attended St. Joseph Military Academy. In 1939, the Capote family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Truman attended Greenwich High School, where he wrote for both the school's literary journal, "The Green Witch", and the school newspaper. When they returned to New York City in 1941, he attended the Franklin School, an Upper West Side private school now known as the Dwight School, and graduated in 1942. That was the end of his formal education.
While still attending Franklin in 1942, Capote began working as a copy boy in the art department at "The New Yorker", a job he held for two years before being fired for angering poet Robert Frost. Years later, he reflected, "Not a very grand job, for all it really involved was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers. Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case." He left his job to live with relatives in Alabama and began writing his first novel, "Summer Crossing".
He was called for induction into the armed services during World War II, but he later told a friend that he was "turned down for everything, including the WACS". He later explained that he was found to be "too neurotic".
Friendship with Harper Lee.
Capote based the character of Idabel in "Other Voices, Other Rooms" on his Monroeville, Alabama neighbor and best friend, Harper Lee. Capote once acknowledged this: "Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Harper Lee's mother and father, lived very near. She was my best friend. Did you ever read her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird"? I'm a character in that book, which takes place in the same small town in Alabama where we lived. Her father was a lawyer, and she and I used to go to trials all the time as children. We went to the trials instead of going to the movies." After Lee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and Capote published "In Cold Blood" in 1966, the authors became increasingly distant from each other.
Writing career.
Short story phase.
Capote began writing short stories around the age of eight. In 2013, the Swiss publisher Peter Haag discovered fourteen unpublished stories, written when Capote was a teenager, in the New York Public Library Archives. Random House published these in 2015, under the title "The Early Stories of Truman Capote".
Between 1943 and 1946, Capote wrote a continual flow of short fiction, including "Miriam", "My Side of the Matter", and "Shut a Final Door" (for which he won the O. Henry Award in 1948, at the age of 24). His stories were published in both literary quarterlies and well-known popular magazines, including "The Atlantic Monthly", "Harper's Bazaar", "Harper's Magazine", "Mademoiselle", "The New Yorker", "Prairie Schooner", and "Story". In June 1945, "Miriam" was published by "Mademoiselle" and went on to win a prize, Best First-Published Story, in 1946. In the spring of 1946, Capote was accepted at Yaddo, the artists and writers colony at Saratoga Springs, New York. (He later endorsed Patricia Highsmith as a Yaddo candidate, and she wrote "Strangers on a Train" while she was there.)
During an interview for "The Paris Review" in 1957, Capote said this of his short story technique:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most "natural" way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.
Random House, the publisher of his novel "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (see below), moved to capitalize on this novel's success with the publication of "A Tree of Night and Other Stories" in 1949. In addition to "Miriam", this collection also includes "Shut a Final Door", first published in "The Atlantic Monthly" (August 1947).
After "A Tree of Night", Capote published a collection of his travel writings, "Local Color" (1950), which included nine essays originally published in magazines between 1946 and 1950.
"A Christmas Memory", a largely autobiographical story taking place in the 1930s, was published in "Mademoiselle" magazine in 1956. It was issued as a hard-cover standalone edition in 1966, and has since been published in many editions and anthologies.
Posthumously published early novel.
Some time in the 1940s, Capote wrote a novel set in New York City about the summer romance of a socialite and a parking lot attendant. Capote later claimed to have destroyed the manuscript of this novel; but twenty years after his death, in 2004, it came to light that the manuscript had been retrieved from the trash back in 1950 by a house sitter at an apartment formerly occupied by Capote. The novel was published in 2006 by Random House under the title "Summer Crossing".
As of 2013, the film rights to "Summer Crossing" had been purchased by actress Scarlett Johansson, who reportedly planned to direct the adaptation.
First novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms".
The critical success of one of his short stories, "Miriam" (1945), attracted the attention of the publisher Bennett Cerf, resulting in a contract with Random House to write a novel. With an advance of $1,500, Capote returned to Monroeville and began "Other Voices, Other Rooms", continuing to work on the manuscript in New Orleans, Saratoga Springs, New York, and North Carolina, eventually completing it in Nantucket, Massachusetts. It was published in 1948. Capote described this symbolic tale as "a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion". The novel is a semi-autobiographical refraction of Capote's Alabama childhood. Decades later, writing in "The Dogs Bark" (1973), he commented:
"Other Voices, Other Rooms" was an attempt to exorcise demons, an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.
The story focuses on thirteen-year-old Joel Knox following the loss of his mother. Joel is sent from New Orleans to live with his father, who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion in rural Alabama, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, debauched transvestite Randolph, and defiant Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remains a mystery. When he finally is allowed to see his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being inadvertently shot by Randolph. Joel runs away with Idabel but catches pneumonia and eventually returns to the Landing, where he is nursed back to health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph is that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window is Randolph in his old Mardi Gras costume. Gerald Clarke, in "Capote: A Biography" (1988) described the conclusion:
Finally, when he goes to join the queer lady in the window, Joel accepts his destiny, which is to be homosexual, to always hear other voices and live in other rooms. Yet acceptance is not a surrender; it is a liberation. "I am me", he whoops. "I am Joel, we are the same people." So, in a sense, had Truman rejoiced when he made peace with his own identity.
Harold Halma photograph.
"Other Voices, Other Rooms" made "The New York Times" bestseller list and stayed there for nine weeks, selling more than 26,000 copies. The promotion and controversy surrounding this novel catapulted Capote to fame. A 1947 Harold Halma photograph used to promote the book showed a reclining Capote gazing fiercely into the camera. Gerald Clarke, in "Capote: A Biography" (1988), wrote, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on the dustjacket of "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948) caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. Truman claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity." Much of the early attention to Capote centered on different interpretations of this photograph, which was viewed as a suggestive pose by some. According to Clarke, the photo created an "uproar" and gave Capote "not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted". The photo made a huge impression on the twenty-year-old Andy Warhol, who often talked about it and wrote fan letters to Capote. When Warhol moved to New York in 1949, he made numerous attempts to meet Capote, and Warhol's fascination with the author led to Warhol's first New