ABSTRACT
Truman Streckfus Persons was born on 30 September 1924 in New Orleans. His parents, Lillie Mae and Archulus ‘Arch’ Persons, divorced when he was six and his mother sent him to Monroeville, Alabama, where he was raised by her relatives. Eventually, in 1933, he moved to New York to live with his mother and her new husband Joseph Capote. In 1935 his stepfather renamed him Truman García Capote. An undistinguished student despite a supposed IQ of 215, Capote left school aged 17 and began working as a copyboy for the New Yorker magazine. He left the magazine under a cloud in 1944 and devoted the rest of his life to writing. Capote’s first published work was a short story entitled ‘Miriam’ for Mademoiselle fashion magazine in 1942. It won an O’Henry Award for Best First-Published Story. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published in 1948 to great acclaim – staying on the New York Times’s bestseller list for nine weeks. The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) were followed by his most famous book, In Cold Blood. This ‘non-fiction’ novel was serialized in the New Yorker in 1965 and became the publishing sensation of 1966. Capote also produced two collections of short stories, some travel writing and a collection of reportage, Music for Chameleons (1980), which included ‘Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime’, first published in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Apart from the unfinished Answered Prayers, however, he wrote no more fiction. He died in Los Angeles of liver disease and ‘drug intoxication’ in August 1984, one month short of his sixtieth birthday. Hollywood’s treatment of In Cold Blood, the movie Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, appeared in 2005 to critical acclaim.
