Truman Capote
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans, as the son of a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen, Lillie Mae Faulk. His father, “Arch” Persons, worked as a clerk for a steamboat company. Arch never stuck at any job for long, and was always leaving home in search for new opportunities. The unhappy marriage gradually disintegrated. When Capote was four, his parents eventually divorced.
In his childhood Capote made friends with Harper Lee, who portrayed him as Dill in her world famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
After Capote’s mother married again, this time a well-to-do businessman, Capote moved to New York, and adopted his stepfather’s surname. He attended the Trinity School and St. John’s Academy in New York, and the public schools of Greenwich, Connecticut. At the age of seventeen, Capote ended his formal schooling. He found work at the New Yorker, where he attracted attention with his eccentric style of dress.
Capote’s early stories were published in quality magazines and in 1946 he won the O.Henry award.
In the 1950s Capote wrote THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS, a musical set in a West Indies bordello. Capote’s lyrical style and melancholy marked his novel THE GRASS HARP. In the story an orphaned boy and two old ladies observe life from a china tree. Eventually they come down from their temporary retreat, unlike Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò in Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees. The book was adapted into screen in 1996, starring Piper Laurie, Sissy Spacek, and Walter Matthau. Capote’s first important film work was collaboration with John Huston on Beat the Devil.
Following return to the United States, Capote wrote BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
Increasing preoccupation with journalism formed the basis for the bestseller In Cold Blood, a pioneering work of documentary novel or “nonfiction novel”. The work started from an article in The New York Times. It dealt with the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas. Sponsored by the magazine, Capote interviewed with Harper Lee local people to recreate the lives of both the murderers and their victims. During the process he became emotionally attached to both killers. However, this did not prevent him from telling the story with utmost objectivity.
The research work and writing took six years to finish. Capote used neither a tape recorder nor note pad, but emptied his interviews and impressions in notebooks at the end of the day. He also recorded last days of the death-obsessed criminals. The trial scene was re-enacted at the Finney County Court House in the Garden City, where the actual trial had taken place. Brooks also used the real jury who had convicted Perry Smith and Dick Hicock.
Among Capote’s other works from the 1960s is the classic A Christmas Memory. In interviews, Capote negative anecdotes about the people he knew distanced him from his friends.