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This is a short essay about the life of Truman Capote along with some facts about his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. SparkNotes also offers a more comprehensive Capote biography here.

Truman Capote (1924-1984)

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924. His parents divorced when he was young, and his childhood was marked by family upheavals and frequent moves. Capote found solace by identifying himself as a writer and he spent a substantial amount of time from the age of eight onward practicing and honing his craft. He eschewed college in favor of writing short stories. After receiving critical acclaim for “Miriam,” a short story that was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1945, Capote was to a signed writing contract by the publishers Random House.

Capote’s initial contract with Random House resulted in the semi-autobiographical novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). A prime example of the Southern Gothic tradition, the novel tells the story of Joel Knox, a lonely 13-year-old boy named with feminine mannerism and behaviors who, after his mother dies, is sent to live in a decaying Mississippi mansion amidst a group of eccentric local characters. The novel describes Joel (the character based partly on Capote himself) as coming to terms and accepting of his homosexuality, so it should come as no surprise that Capote was openly gay. However, it must be kept in mind that being out was highly unusual at the time—especially for someone as well-known as Capote.

The success of Other Voices, Other Rooms made Capote a celebrity not just within the literary world, but with the public at large as well. This celebrity identification and the attention that came with it, for better or for worse (and most observers believe it was ultimately for worse), became an inextricable aspect of Capote—not just as a person, but as a writer.

In the 18 years between Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948 and the publication of Capote’s best known work, In Cold Blood, in 1966, he successfully published short stories, magazine articles, and novellas, and did some play and screenwriting as well—but he produced no novels. A 1949 collection of short stories, A Tree of Night and Other Short Stories, includes the title story as well as “Miriam.” One of Capote’s best-known stories, the autobiographical “A Christmas Memory,” was originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. During the 1950s, Capote published several nonfiction pieces, including a collection of his travel writings called Local Color (1950) and The Muses Are Heard (1956), a compilation of his articles published in The New Yorker chronicling Capote’s travels with a production company for George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union. In 1959, he published the essay Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir about living in that New York City neighborhood.

Capote wrote two well-received novellas during the 1950s. He adapted one, Grass Harp (1951), into a Broadway play in 1952. However, Capote’s best-known work between publishing Other Voices, Other Rooms and In Cold Blood is his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was considered controversial even before it was published. The novella was originally going to appear as a series of installments in Harper’s Bazaar, but the magazine’s publisher, William Randolph Hearst Jr., deemed the material too controversial. Angered, Capote took the story to Esquire instead. The novella is significantly different from the more famous 1961 movie of the same name directed by Blake Edwards, but both tell the story of a writer recalling his remarkable acquaintance with his neighbor, an unforgettable character named Holly Golightly—whom Capote would later call his favorite literary creation. The novella was a huge success and attracted enormous praise for its author, including from Norman Mailer, who responded to the novella by calling Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.”

Since the late 1950s, Capote had been seeking to compose what he termed “an epic nonfiction novel.” In 1966, In Cold Blood became that book as well as the response to detractors who felt he lacked the capacity for longer, more serious writing. The preparation that Capote undertook in developing In Cold Blood is now legendary in its scope and intensity. It began in 1959, when Capote noticed a brief newspaper article in the New York Times describing the recent murders of four members of the Cuttler family in Holcomb, Kansas, which was still being investigated. He decided that this might be the perfect story for the book that he sought to write. Six years of intense research—including lengthy stretches in Kansas interviewing those involved—followed. It is said that Capote ended up with over 8,000 pages of notes. Aiding Capote in this research was his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, who was on the verge of publishing her massive bestselling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1961).

In Cold Blood was initially published as a series of four articles in The New Yorker in late 1965. The reaction to the articles was a sensation, and when Random House published the book version in January 1966, it quickly went to the top of the bestsellers list.

The years between the immediate success of In Cold Blood in 1966 and Capote’s death in 1984 were filled with notoriety and controversy for Capote, but they were anticlimactic in terms of his literary output. This period of Capote’s life centered on his falling out with a group of wealthy society women that he called his “swans” over his plans to publish a roman à clef novel that he planned to call Answered Prayers.

The feud led to Capote’s near total social ostracization from a group of people whose attention and companionship he had grown dependent on. Had it also resulted in any literary output that came close to equaling the high levels of quality found in his earlier works, it might have been a fair trade-off. Sadly, though, that was not the case. A short story excerpt from the planned Answered Prayers called “La Côte Basque, 1965” and the two chapters published by Esquire in 1976 were judged to be merely gossipy, meandering, and distinctly lacking in structure or literary merit. In 1986, an unfinished version of Answered Prayers was published posthumously to similarly negative appraisals.

One brief reminder of Capote’s past skills would surface in December 1982 when the Ladies’ Home Journal published his short story “One Christmas,” which remains popular—particularly during the Christmas season. Capote died in August of 1984 at the age of 59.

Next section Context: Comparing the Novella to the Movie

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