Capote, Truman

orig. Truman Streckfus Persons

born Sept. 30, 1924, New Orleans, La., U.S.

died Aug. 25, 1984, Los Angeles, Calif.

U.S. novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.

Capote spent much of his youth in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama. His early works, in the Southern Gothic tradition, include the novels Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) and the story collection A Tree of Night (1949). His later journalistic style was exemplified in the highly successful "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966), an account of a multiple murder. Other works include the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958; film, 1961), the musical House of Flowers (1954; with Harold Arlen), and the collections The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980).

* * *

▪ American author

original name  Truman Streckfus Persons  

born Sept. 30, 1924, New Orleans, La., U.S.

died Aug. 25, 1984, Los Angeles, Calif.

 American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His early writing extended the Southern Gothic tradition, but he later developed a more journalistic approach in the novel In Cold Blood (1965), which remains his best-known work.

      His parents were divorced when he was young, and he spent his childhood with various elderly relatives in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama. (He owed his surname to his mother's remarriage, to Joseph Garcia Capote.) He attended private schools and eventually joined his mother and stepfather at Millbrook, Conn., where he completed his secondary education at Greenwich High School.

      Capote drew on his childhood experiences for many of his early works of fiction. Having abandoned further schooling, he achieved early literary recognition in 1945 when his haunting short story “Miriam” was published in Mademoiselle magazine; it won the O. Henry Memorial Award the following year, the first of four such awards Capote was to receive. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), was acclaimed as the work of a young writer of great promise. The book is a sensitive portrayal of a homosexually inclined boy's search for his father and his own identity through a nightmarishly decadent Southern world. The short story “Shut a Final Door” (O. Henry Award, 1946) and other tales of loveless and isolated persons were collected in A Tree of Night (1949). The quasi-autobiographical novel The Grass Harp (1951) is a story of nonconforming innocents who retire temporarily from life to a tree house, returning renewed to the real world. One of Capote's most popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958; filmed 1961), is a novella about a young, fey Manhattan playgirl.

      Capote's increasing preoccupation with journalism was reflected in the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, a chilling account of a multiple murder committed by two young psychopaths in Kansas. Capote spent six years interviewing the principals in the case, and the critical and popular success of his novel about them was the high point of his dual careers as a writer and a celebrity socialite. For though a serious writer, Capote was also a party-loving sybarite who became a darling of the rich and famous of high society. Endowed with a quirky but attractive character, he entertained television audiences with outrageous tales recounted in his distinctively high-pitched Southern drawl.

      Capote's later writings never approached the success of his earlier ones. In the late 1960s he adapted two short stories about his childhood, “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” for television. The Dogs Bark (1973) consists of collected essays and profiles over a 30-year span, while the collection Music for Chameleons (1980) includes both fiction and nonfiction. In later years Capote's growing dependence on drugs and alcohol stifled his productivity. Moreover, selections from a projected work that he considered to be his masterpiece, a social satire entitled Answered Prayers, appeared in Esquire magazine in 1975 and raised a storm among friends and foes who were harshly depicted in the work (under the thinnest of disguises). He was thereafter ostracized by his former celebrity friends. Answered Prayers remained unfinished at his death.

* * *