Truman Capote

Truman Garcia Capote (born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) worked as an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Alongside figures like Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, he is counted among the originators of New Journalism. Critics have hailed many of his short stories, novels, and plays as literary classics. Over twenty films and television productions have adapted his work or been based on his life.

Capote’s early years were difficult. His parents divorced, his mother was absent for long stretches, and the family moved repeatedly. By age eight, he had decided to become a writer, and he spent his childhood sharpening his skills. He started his professional life by publishing short stories. The positive reception of “Miriam” (1945) caught the eye of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, leading to a contract for the novel *Other Voices, Other Rooms* (1948). He gained broad fame with *Breakfast at Tiffany’s* (1958), a novella centered on a fictional New York café society girl named Holly Golightly, and the true-crime book *In Cold Blood* (1966), a journalistic account of a Kansas farm family murdered in their home. Writing the latter took six years, with help from his lifelong friend Harper Lee, author of *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). For the next four or five years, he was sent to Monroeville, Alabama, where his mother’s relatives raised him. He grew very close to a distant relative of his mother, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom he called “Sook.” Capote described her in “A Christmas Memory” (1956) as having a face “remarkable – not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind.” In Monroeville, Capote lived near Harper Lee, who also became a celebrated writer and remained his friend for life. The character Dill in Lee’s *To Kill a Mockingbird* is likely modeled on Capote.

As a lonely child, Capote taught himself to read and write before starting school. At age five, he was often seen carrying a dictionary and notepad, and he began writing fiction at eleven. Around that time, he earned the nickname “Bulldog.” On Saturdays, he traveled from Monroeville to the nearby Gulf Coast city of Mobile, where he once submitted a short story, “Old Mrs. Busybody,” to a children’s writing contest run by the *Mobile Press Register*. In 1936, The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards recognized his early work.

In 1932, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, José García Capote, a former Spanish colonel who became a landlord in Union de Reyes, Cuba. Reflecting on his youth, Capote said, “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.” That same year, he attended Trinity School in New York City, then St. Joseph Military Academy. In 1939, the Capote family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he attended Greenwich High School and wrote for the school’s literary journal, *The Green Witch*, and its newspaper. After returning to New York City in 1941, he attended the Franklin School (now the Dwight School) on the Upper West Side, graduating in 1942. That marked the end of his formal education.

While still at Franklin in 1942, Capote started work as a copy boy in the art department at *The New Yorker*. He held the job for two years before being fired for angering poet Robert Frost. He later said, “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.” After leaving, he stayed with relatives in Alabama and began writing his first novel, *Summer Crossing*. During World War II, he was called for military induction but later told a friend he was “turned down for everything, including the WACS.” He explained that he was deemed “too neurotic.”

**Friendship with Harper Lee**

Capote based the character Idabel in *Other Voices, Other Rooms* on his Monroeville neighbor and closest friend, Harper Lee. He once said, “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 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and Capote published *In Cold Blood* in 1966, the two authors grew increasingly apart.

**Writing career**

**Short story phase**

Capote started writing short stories at about age eight. In 2013, Swiss publisher Peter Haag found fourteen unpublished stories from Capote’s teenage years in the New York Public Library Archives. Random House released them in 2015 as *The Early Stories of Truman Capote*. Between 1943 and 1946, he produced a steady stream of short fiction, including “Miriam,” “My Side of the Matter,” and “Shut a Final Door” (which won him the O. Henry Award in 1948, when he was 24). His stories were published in...