—David Ebershoff, Random House
BOOKS BY TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
A Tree of Night and Other Stories
Local Color
The Grass Harp
The Muses Are Heard
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Observations (with Richard Avedon)
Selected Writings of Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
A Christmas Memory
The Thanksgiving Visitor
The Dogs Bark
Music for Chameleons
One Christmas
Three by Truman Capote
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
A Capote Reader
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote
(edited by Gerald Clarke)
Summer Crossing
The Early Stories of Truman Capote
Biographical Note
Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early 1940s, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties. His novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and his novella The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.
From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples are Local Color (1950) and The Muses Are Heard (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953).
Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death (1976).
He worked for many years on Answered Prayers, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). He died in Los Angeles on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.
About the Truman Capote Literary Trust
The Truman Capote Literary Trust was created by Truman Capote as part of his Last Will and Testament and is the repository of all of Capote’s works. As he directed, all the income from the Trust is used to support an annual prize for the best work of literary criticism in the English language as well as scholarships and fellowships in creative writing, which are administered by various colleges and universities throughout the United States. Along with his writing, the Trust is truly Truman Capote’s ongoing legacy, both creatively and financially, to the literary community that he cherished.
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