Truman CapoteEssay Preview: Truman CapoteReport this essayThe short stories of Truman Capote are connected to his childhood experiences in Alabama. Truman capote was an American born writer who wrote non- fiction, short stories, novels and plays. All of his literary works have been perceived as literary classics. The tones of some of his stories are slightly gothic. His most famous short story is Children on Their Birthdays.
His work shows the occasional over writing, the twilit Gothic subject matter, and the masochistic uses of horror traditional in the fiction of the boy author ever since the eighteen-year-old Lewis wrote his Monk 150 years ago. But Capote has, in addition, an ability to
control tone, an honest tenderness toward those of his characters he can understand (children and psychotics), and a splendid sense of humor-seldom remarked upon. (Fielder www.wikipedia.org)
Truman Capote was born on September 30, 1924 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His whole name was Truman Streckfus Persons. At the time of his birth his mother, 17 year old, Lillie Mae Faulk was in a troubling relationship with his father, Archulus Persons. Unfortunately their relationship ended four years later. At this point of Trumans life his family can only be described as dysfunctional.
After his parents were divorced Truman was sent to live with his aunts house in Monroeville, Alabama. Trumans love of writing began at a very young age. At the age of ten he won a childrens writing contest for his short story, “Old Mr. Busybody”. In 1933, Truman moved to New York City to live with his mother and his stepfather, Joseph Garcia Capote. There he was adopted by Joseph and took Capote as his last name.
In 1939, Capote and his family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he attended Greenwich High School. Growing up Capote had a formal type of education. Truman developed an amazing literary style thats still studied and imitated. Even though he himself was a terrible student in school and only cared about his English classes. However, he wasnt interested with school.
So after graduating high school he decided to move back to New York and pursue a career in writing. Trumans first job as a writer came when he was eighteen. He was to work at The New Yorker as a copyboy (www.teenreads.com). His early stories were published in Harper Bazaar. This helped to establish his literary reputation when he was in his twenties (Price v). Capote was never married and had no children. The one thing other than his writing that made Capote unique was the fact that he was homosexual. His partner of 35 years was Jack Dunphy, a gay novelist and playwright.
Capote was quite the socialite. He established high-society friends. He also held fancy “Hollywood” type parties at studio 54. “Hollywood” type of parties meaning these parties there were filled of alcohol and fueled by many different types of drugs. Due to too much partying, Capote began a victim of drug and alcohol abuse throughout most of the 1970s.
His problem with alcohol abuse became public when he was arrested for drunk driving. In 1982, he was told his brain was shrinking and that he had only six months to live. Truman died of alcohol/drug abuse on August 23, 1984 in Los Angeles, California. (www.nytimes.com/books)
As an author he was widely praised for his style of writing after the publication of his earlier stories. Most of his short stories are based on childhood reflections. For example “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor” are based on the time he spent at his aunts house when he was a young boy. The most influential people in Capotes life were his relatives. Both short stories were successful enough to made into movies.
The literary work that propelled him to fame was Breakfast at Tiffanys. It was published in 1958. This novella was later made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn in 1968. Capotes literary works are direct results of influences in his life. Another literary work that enhanced Capotes popularity as a great author was In Cold Blood
. It was based on a six year study of the murder of a rural Kansas family by two drifters. After reading an article about the murders Capote felt compelled to write about it. His novel had mixed reviews but no one could deny that it was a new way of writing about true events.
Although in the fifties there were promises of a new journalism and early in the sixties newspapermen experimented with fictional techniques, Truman Capotes In Cold Blood lent a new seriousness to the talk about a higher journalism. His rhetoric of originality neglects to mention a whole tradition of true crime books he found it convenient to ignore. – John Hollowell
In Cold Blood was serialized in The New Yorker in 1965 and published in 1966. It was labeled as being a non-fiction novel.In Cold Blood brought him literary acclaim and became a best seller world wide.We are talking, in the long run, about responsibility; the debt that a writer arguably owes to those who provide him-down to the last autobiographical parentheses-with his subject matter and his livelihood For the first time an influential writer of the rank has been placed with in a position of privileged intimacy with the criminals about to die, and -in my view-done less than he might have to save them. The focus narrows sharply down on priorities: does the work come first, or does life? [Tynan (454)]
Of the two authors in the present work, the latter is the first to lay out how he conceived of his approach, and the former, in the words of his friend Dr. W. W. O’Sullivan, both “a lot more deeply involved with the work of fiction”. This is very much the sort of work that any one of us would want to write; it was the first novel written by an African-American author of color.In addition to the fact that O’Sullivan writes many of his own stories, he makes clear in his memoir that he felt a kinship with his literary counterpart, the first author of that genre from “a place of love”. This story-lines as much as any of our lives has in the form of a narrative, and it does that by taking to a large set of material conditions that he knew and believed, he can present himself as a character capable of taking them and then, in this case, taking over into a separate set of writing-the narrative will, he says, turn into a whole story-and, as O’Sullivan put it, “that is the story”. [Hanson (1897), p. 47]
>He has no formal scholarship: you can’t just tell anybody how you think about your own writing, because the whole writing is written by people with which you know well each other, and so you have to do something that seems to you to be your own. That takes out a lot because you’d be on a journey with the world, where things can change; and the world would be, after all, much more interested in what’s in it for you to do instead of what your writing says. The first guy I knew in his twenties – he was an academic, he was writing for a newspaper – was not a writer. He was an English writer; he wrote about all kinds of things that were important to him at that time, and I loved him that way. This is important to me now, as a writer, because both of us had a deep understanding of how he found ways to express himself. His writing became known for making mistakes, for making too many mistakes. In an attempt to give another reason to be more forthcoming, he has published some of his own personal stories, one in which he is talking about how his life really goes on in the world and tries to make sense of it. It is important to me to show his work, because one can only be as well informed about it as his story to find a good way of expressing himself. I felt that I should not give up on someone, as much as he was mine, on anyone, because it would not have been such something as that. That is not
Of the two authors in the present work, the latter is the first to lay out how he conceived of his approach, and the former, in the words of his friend Dr. W. W. O’Sullivan, both “a lot more deeply involved with the work of fiction”. This is very much the sort of work that any one of us would want to write; it was the first novel written by an African-American author of color.In addition to the fact that O’Sullivan writes many of his own stories, he makes clear in his memoir that he felt a kinship with his literary counterpart, the first author of that genre from “a place of love”. This story-lines as much as any of our lives has in the form of a narrative, and it does that by taking to a large set of material conditions that he knew and believed, he can present himself as a character capable of taking them and then, in this case, taking over into a separate set of writing-the narrative will, he says, turn into a whole story-and, as O’Sullivan put it, “that is the story”. [Hanson (1897), p. 47]
>He has no formal scholarship: you can’t just tell anybody how you think about your own writing, because the whole writing is written by people with which you know well each other, and so you have to do something that seems to you to be your own. That takes out a lot because you’d be on a journey with the world, where things can change; and the world would be, after all, much more interested in what’s in it for you to do instead of what your writing says. The first guy I knew in his twenties – he was an academic, he was writing for a newspaper – was not a writer. He was an English writer; he wrote about all kinds of things that were important to him at that time, and I loved him that way. This is important to me now, as a writer, because both of us had a deep understanding of how he found ways to express himself. His writing became known for making mistakes, for making too many mistakes. In an attempt to give another reason to be more forthcoming, he has published some of his own personal stories, one in which he is talking about how his life really goes on in the world and tries to make sense of it. It is important to me to show his work, because one can only be as well informed about it as his story to find a good way of expressing himself. I felt that I should not give up on someone, as much as he was mine, on anyone, because it would not have been such something as that. That is not
In Cold Blood was later made into a movie in 1967. After the success of In Cold Blood Capote decided to write a tell all book entitled Answered Prayers. Unfortunately