Truman Capote

Early Life

• Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Alabama.
• As a child he lived a solitary and lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. "I began writing really sort of seriously 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.”

Early Life

• In his teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with his mother and her new husband.
• Disoriented by life in the city, he dropped out of school, and at 17, got a job with The New Yorker.

Writing

• Within a few years, he was writing regularly for an assortment of publications.
• One of his stories, Miriam, attracted the attention of publisher Bennett Cerf, who signed the young writer to a contract with Random House.

Writing

• 1948: Other Voices, Other Rooms received instant notoriety for its fine prose and its frank discussion of homosexual themes.
• The young writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants.

Writing

• 1958: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the subsequent hit film starring Audrey Hepburn enhanced Capote's popularity and a place among high society.
• 1959: Capote set about creating a new literary genre – the non-fiction novel -- which became In Cold Blood.

In Cold Blood

• 1966: In Cold Blood is the story of the 1959 murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters.
• Capote left his jet-set friends and went to Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the process by which they coped with this loss.
• During his stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an involved interview with both.
• For six years, he became enmeshed in the lives of both the killers and the townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes.

Answered Prayers

• 1975: Capote began to work on a project exploring the intimate details of his friends—the rich and the famous--called Answered Prayers
• The shock of the initial negative reactions sent him into a spiral of drug and alcohol use, during which time he wrote little of any quality.
• When Capote died in 1984, at the age of 59, he left behind no evidence of any continued progress on the book.