Truman Capote

Truman Capote was an American author whose In Cold Blood invented the non-fiction novel, whose Breakfast at Tiffany's created an enduring cultural icon, and who died with his masterpiece Answered Prayers unfinished.

Truman Capote published his first story in a national magazine at seventeen and his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), at twenty-three. The novel — a Southern Gothic coming-of-age story about a boy discovering his sexuality in a decaying Louisiana mansion — was as notable for its author photograph (Capote reclined with insolent grace on a sofa) as for the text itself. He was performing a public persona before he had built a private one, and the performance continued for the rest of his life.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is the work that made him a cultural fixture: Holly Golightly, the call girl who belongs nowhere and wants Fifth Avenue to be home, is one of American fiction’s great creations. The novella is wistful, funny, and aware of its own limits in ways the Audrey Hepburn film is not. In Cold Blood (1966) is in a different register entirely — six years of reporting on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and the trial and execution of the killers, assembled into a narrative of such compositional control that it essentially invented a genre.

Answered Prayers, the novel Capote spent the last decades of his life claiming was nearly complete, remained unfinished at his death in 1984. The chapters published in Esquire in 1975 — barely veiled portraits of the New York society whose confidences he had cultivated and now betrayed — cost him most of his friendships. The published fragment suggests a book that might have been his finest.