Truman Capote

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana September 30, 1924 Died: Los Angeles, California August 25, 1984 Capotes greatest accomplishment was his merging of the dramatic narrative techniques of fiction with the objective reportage of journalism in what he termed the nonfiction novel.

Library of Congress

Biography
Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons, the only child of J. Archulus Persons and Lillie Mae Faulk Persons. During the first six years of his childhood, the boy frequently was handed off to the care of relatives by his carefree and irresponsible parents. Following his parents permanent separation when Truman was six, he was left fully in the care of relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. Being raised by a series of relatives, Capote had a lonely childhood existence; the experience forced him, as he said in many interviews as an adult, to create his own world, personality, and sense of identity. The search for that sense of selfhood was to be a frequent theme in his literary work, both fiction and nonfiction. One imaginative influence on the young Capote was his eccentric cousin Sook Faulk, who encouraged the boys propensity for fantasy invention. He was later to recall Sook as the doting parent surrogate in his short story A Christmas Memory. Capotes childhood days can be seen in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), written by his childhood friend Harper Lee, in which the youthful Capote appears as the character Dill. Following his parents divorce in 1931, Capote spent most of his time in Monroeville until his mother was remarried in 1932 to Joseph Capote. Following their mar-

riage, the boy was to change his name legally to Capote and eventually move to New York to live with his mother and stepfather. Capote attended private schools in Manhattan and ultimately graduated from the Franklin School, although his attendance had been, at best, irregular. The boys time in an exciting metropolitan New York environment came at an impressionable age, and Capote, like one of his later heroines, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys (1958), loved the pace, sophistication, and glamour of New York. Capotes childhood fascination with words continued in his teenage years as he served as a copyboy and file clerk at The New Yorker magazine. Although none of Capotes early work in fiction was published by The New Yorker, in 1945, the twentyone-year-old writer published several short stories that gained for him almost instant literary attention: Miriam, which appeared in Mademoiselle magazine; A Tree of Night, in Harpers Bazaar; and My Side of the Matter, in Story magazine. The appearance of these stories, and the subsequent publication in 1948 at age twenty-three of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, achieved for the young writer overnight international acclaim. Capote often described the novel as a poetic version of his own lonely childhoodsensitive, abandoned, and isolated. The book was, he said, an emotional, or spiritual, autobiography, if not an actual literal one. The novels romanticized treatment of a homosexual theme made it a sensation in the late 1940s, when only one other contemporary novel, Gore Vidals The City and the Pillar (1948), had dealt with homosexuality. The controversy 397

Truman Capote over Capotes book was further intensified by the now-famous picture of the youthful author on its back cover sprawled seductively on a chaise longue with his blond bangs hanging over his elfin face. Capote quickly added to his reputation as a master of prose style with his 1949 short-story collection A Tree of Night, and Other Stories and the 1951 novella The Grass Harp. In the 1950s, Capote began to explore a variety of journalistic approaches to writing, including the travel recollection of Local Color (1950), an extended account of an American opera companys tour of the Soviet Union in The Muses Are Heard (1956), and his 1959 volume of commentary accompanying the photographs of Richard Avedon, Observations. In 1958, he produced his successful novella Breakfast at Tiffanys, which further enhanced his reputation as a fiction writer. An equally popular film version of the novella followed in 1961. In the 1950s and 1960s, Capote applied his talents to other literary forms, adapting two of his works for the theaterhis novella, The Grass Harp, and later his short work House of Flowers, which was made into a musical. He also wrote two screenplays for films, Beat the Devil (1953) and a film version of Henry Jamess gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), released under the title The Innocents (1961). During the 1960s, Capote also published the first two parts of what was to be a trilogy of emotionally etched stories of his childhood in the South: A Christmas Memory appeared in 1966 (it had originally been printed in Mademoiselle in 1956), followed by The Thanksgiving Visitor in 1967. A year before his death, a third volume, One Christmas (1983), was published, dealing with the visit of a boy to see his father, separated from him by divorce. Capotes major achievement in the 1960s, however, was to be the 1966 nonfiction book In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. This work, which describes the murder of the Clutter farm family in Kansas, required six years of research by the author. Many critics view In Cold Blood as Capotes finest work; the author maintained that he had created a new art form, the nonfiction novel. This new form combined the detached observation of journalistic reportage with the dramatic story-telling techniques of fiction. Capote spent years in Kansas after the crime 398 was committed and, upon the capture of the two men charged with the killings, more time investigating the lives and motives of the killers right up to the time of their execution. The publication of In Cold Blood, first in installments in The New Yorker and later as a book, made Capote wealthy and gave him unparalleled celebrity as an author. Following the success of In Cold Blood, Capote announced that the next literary project he would undertake was to be a roman clef about New York and the international jet set with which he personally had become so familiar. Its title was to be Answered Prayers, and when completed, Capote predicted, the work would rival the achievement of French novelist Marcel Prousts monumental la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), a claim Capote made repeatedly in television talk show appearances. His personal life and physical well-being, however, became increasingly chaotic during the 1970s. He wrote in a personal reminiscence, an interview with himself in his 1980 volume, Music for Chameleons: Im an alcoholic. Im a drug addict. Im homosexual. Im a genius. The complications from all those conditions simultaneously caused erratic behavior by the writer in his last decade and greatly diminished his writing volume, which had never been great because of his insistence on perfection of style. In 1973, he had published a collection of short pieces, The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places. Music for Chameleons included not only more personal profiles but also a new short account of another true crime, Handcarved Coffins, a kind of In Cold Blood in miniature. In 1983, the third of his childhood recollections appeared, a slender story in book form, One Christmas. Only four portions of Answered Prayers ever appeared. These four parts ran in 1975 and 1976 in Esquire magazine, and their appearance created a personal disaster for the writer, as many of the thinly disguised portraits of his friends grievously offended their models. Many of the writers wealthy friends simply cut all contact with Capote. In his last years, Capote was subject to frequent bouts with and recuperations from his many substance dependencies. He died in 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday, while on a visit to Los Angeles. Following Capotes death, an extensive search was made for the missing portions of An-

Truman Capote swered Prayers, those segments the author so often said that he had completed. No portions of the workother than those already published in magazine installmentswere ever found. Some believe that Capote did write the complete book and destroyed the remaining sections. Others think the missing portions may exist somewhere, but the majority opinion holds that Capote never really wrote the rest of what he had promised would be his most revealing, most stylistically controlled work. The known segments were published after his death under the title Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel in 1986. conflict between vulnerable persons similarly outside their more conventional environment. This theme can be seen in a number of his works, such as Other Voices, Other Rooms, and even in the real-life killer of his masterwork, In Cold Blood. Often this theme is played out in his work through a confrontation of an unconventional outsider with the conforming, ordered world. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, Cousin Randolph, the homosexual older relative, states the outsiders lament as he attempts to explain the search for love to the youthful Joel, explaining that all men are isolated from one another, that everyone, in the end, is alone:
Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a persons nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Analysis
In the preface to the last collection of his work published in his lifetime, the 1980 volume Music for Chameleons, Capote discussed in detail his views about the ordeal of writing as a creative activity and his own lifetime commitment to that pursuit. Writing was an occupation with a great risk to it: One had to take chances or fail. Indeed, Capote compared writing to professional pool playing and to a professional card dealers abilities. He also explained that he began writing as a child of eight and was, by his view, an accomplished writer at seventeen. Thus, when Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared in 1948, he viewed it as the end result of fourteen years of writing experience. The substance of writingand its accompanying pain of creationCapote explained with a phrase he borrowed from Henry James; it was the madness of art. All imaginative writing was, he explained, the artist employing his creative powers of observation, of description, of telling detail; it was that act that led Capote in his later writing to see the possibilities of journalism (which is factual, detailed observation of truth) as an art form that could be as powerful as fictional writing. So it was that he shifted from fiction to nonfiction in midcareer with works such as The Muses Are Heard and his most famous work, In Cold Blood. For Capote, the writer is, by nature, an outsider, the observer seeing and hearing that which is about him but comprehending the witnessed events with an artistic sensitivity unknown to others. The outsiders perspective issimply because it is detached from the observed societymore comprehensive. As he was an artist outside, it was natural that Capotes works often dealt with the

A similar idea occurs in The Grass Harp when Judge Cool, having joined a rebellious group hiding in a tree house, speaks of those who are pagans or spirits and defines them as accepters of life, because they are those who grant lifes differences. Some of the more flamboyant examples of the free, nonconforming spirit are seen in Capotes female characters, specifically Idabel, the tomboy twin of Other Voices, Other Rooms, who outwrestles young Joel in one scene and whose lack of femininity is an obvious counterpoint to Joels boyhood homosexual longings. Another such unconventional personality is Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffanys, who has run away from her background of poverty and also from a childhood marriage to seek glamor and to indulge her New York encounters with a series of wealthy men. Hollys defiance of convention is as meaningful as Joels and Idabels or, for that matter, the runaways in The Grass Harp, whose tree house retreat is Capotes symbol for all places of security for those who may be yearning for a place for their differences, their individual spirits, their ideal fantasies to be at home. Capote frequently said in interviews that he saw in the real-life killersparticularly Perry Smith of In Cold Blood the man he might have become had his own life taken a different turn. His realization 399

Truman Capote was that the killers were the evil side of the same yearning for love, acceptance, even artistic achievement (especially with Smith) that he had known. That desire is seen in a key scene in Miami after the murders, as Perry realizes that all his hopes and ambitions are a dead end:
Anyway, he couldnt see that he had a lot to live for. Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasuresuch dreams were gone. Gone, too, was Perry OParsons, the name invented for the singing sensation of stage and screen that hed half-seriously hoped some day to be.

In Capotes musical, House of Flowers, one of the characters sings a song of yearning for escape from the everyday titled I Never Has Seen Snow, and snow is a recurring image in many Capote works for the elusive dreams of life. One of the young boyfriends of the Clutter girl recalls becoming lost in a snowstorm in In Cold Blood. The cook, Missouri, hopes to run away north to see snow in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Judge Cools distant wife had died in the snows of Switzerland in The Grass Harp. Ultimately, in a world that fails to understand or make room for the sensitive, artistic spirits, the different, Capote returns frequently to the idea, stated by Judge Cool, that whatever passions compose them, private worlds are goodthat is, unless turned to evil ends by the greater uncomprehending world.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

First published: 1948 Type of work: Novel A young boy, seeking his lost father, moves into a strange household in Mississippi where he encounters bizarre relatives while trying to find love. Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capotes first published long work, is a moody and atmospheric tale characterized both by its strange settinga decaying mansion in rural Mississippiand by the host of peculiar characters it presents to the reader. The book details the encounters of thirteen400

year-old Joel Knox Sansom, who travels to an old mansion, Skullys Landing, where he hopes to meet his long-lost father, Edward Sansom. In its emphasis on romantic and ghostly settings and its use of strange, eccentric characters, Other Voices, Other Rooms is typical of what has been termed the southern gothic school of fiction, a style of fiction marked by its use of the grotesque both in locale and in characterization. This category can be seen in the works of other southern-born fiction writers such as William Faulkner (his short story A Rose for Emily and his 1931 novel Sanctuary both offer elements of southern gothic), Tennessee Williams (his 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer deals with incest, homosexuality, insanity, lobotomy, and cannibalism), Carson McCullers (her 1941 novel Reflections in a Golden Eye and her story Ballad of the Sad Caf both have grotesque situations and characters), and Flannery OConnor (her 1952 novel Wise Blood deals with religious obsession and madness). In Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote uses this sense of the strange and the mysterious to convey the loneliness, isolation, and navet of Joel. When Joel arrives at Skullys Landing, he meets a variety of unusual characters: an ancient black man, Jesus Fever; Jesus Fevers granddaughter, a twenty-one-year-old cook named Missouri (nicknamed Zoo); Joels father, the bedridden invalid Edward Sansom (who communicates with the rest of the household by rolling red tennis balls down the stairs); his fathers new wife, Miss Amy; and a much-talked-about cousin, Randolph. En route to the Landing, Joel also has met two young girls, the twins Florabel Thompkins and her tomboy twin sister, Idabel. (Many interpreters of Capotes work see Idabel as Capotes fictional version of his own childhood friend, Harper Lee.) While the main plot of the book appears to be dealing with Joels attempt to find and, later, to talk with his father, Capote really is presenting the plight of Joel as a lonely, sensitive youth who is, in fact, trying to come to terms with his own identity in an environment where he has no moorings. In one key scene, he tries to pray; he finds it almost impossible to ask God for someone to love him, yet that is really what the boy is seeking. It is the search for love that defines the lives of many of the characters in Other Voices, Other Rooms : Cousin Randolph, Joels homosexual older rela-

Truman Capote tive, still laments the loss of his great love, a boxer named Pepe Alvarez, and Miss Amy has married Joels fathereven though the man is an invalid to have someone to care for and love. These aspirations to love are reflected in the desperation of other characters: At a carnival, Joel is pursued by the midget woman, Miss Wisteria, who, throughout her tragic life, has never found anyone her own size to love. Similarly, the cook, Zoo, has suffered from her first experience with love; at age fourteen, she had married a man named Keg Brown who tried to kill her. Zoo seeks a place of beauty and purity, which, in her fantasy, she believes she will find in the North, where she hopes to go to see snow for the first time. At the end of the novel, Joel, after recuperating from a severe illness during which he was cared for by Cousin Randolph, makes a decision about his life. He realizes that Randolph is, in many ways, a child like himself who has simply sought love in his life. Joel decides that he must abandon his childhood and accept his own sexual nature; at the end of the novel, the mature Joel ascends from the haunted garden at Skullys Landing to Randolphs room to embrace Randolph, leaving behind both his youth and his own sexual longing. Eleven-year-old Collin Fenwick, from whose point of view the work is told, is sent as a young boy by his grieving father to live with two unmarried cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo. The father was distraught over the death of Collins mother, so much so that he took off his clothes and ran naked into the yard the day of her death. Collin is similar to Joel Knox Sansom of Other Voices, Other Rooms (and to the real-life youthful Capote) in that he is a lonely boy being raised by odd relatives. The Talbo household consists of Verena, the domineering force, who also has a head for business activities in the town; Dolly, the somewhat addled but good-hearted sister; a black woman, Catherine Creek, a companion to Dolly, who insists that she really is an Indian; and Collin, the boy who frequently spies on the household residents in different rooms through peepholes in the attic floor. As a study of human loneliness, The Grass Harp echoes the themes of Other Voices, Other Rooms: the isolated, unloved, and unwanted child as well as the quiet desperation of many adults in small communities who suffer their own private terrors and despair. Dolly, Catherine, and Collin spend time regularly on picnics held in the hidden tree house of two lofty China trees outside the town. The tree house becomes a vehicle for their transport away from their real lives in the constricting town and into worlds of their imaginings. Verena, too though not in their grouphas suffered rejection; her intense friendship with another woman, Maudie Laurie Murphy, was lost when Maudie married a liquor salesman from St. Louis, left on a wedding trip (paid for by Verena), and never returned. While The Grass Harp covers Collins life from age eleven to age sixteen, the primary conflict of the work develops when sisters Dolly and Verena quarrel over a dropsy medicine formula known only by Dolly but which Verena hopes to develop commercially with a new man friend, Dr. Morris Ritz, a confidence man she met in Chicago. Dolly, viewing her formula as her own, decides to leave the house, taking both Collin and Catherine Creek with her. With no real destination or other home, the group moves into the tree shelter, while Verena arouses the town in a search for the runaways. There are several comical encounters as a posse, including the local sheriff and a stuffy minister, attempts to get the group out of the tree. The groups rebellious independence is attractive to others, 401

The Grass Harp

First published: 1951 Type of work: Novella In a rigid, small-town, southern setting, an odd assortment of local people attempt to assert control over their lives by their defiance of convention.

The Grass Harp, Capotes sadly humorous tale about a curious collection of small-town southern eccentrics, continued the romantic and occasionally bizarre mood of his earlier Other Voices, Other Rooms, but his emphasis in this work more often is on the possibilities for humor in such strange behavior rather than on shock value. Capote captured the same tone of southern small-town hilarity that one also finds in many of the short stories of Eudora Welty.

Truman Capote however, including a teenage loner, Riley Henderson, and the elderly Judge Charlie Cool, and both soon join the tree-dwellers in their defiance of the towns authority figures. At one point, the Judge summarizes the shared plight of the trees inhabitants, telling them that there may not be a place in society for characters such as they are; he thinks there may be a place for them somewhere, however, and that the tree just might be the spot. The search for that true, spiritual, homefor a place of real belonginghaunts each of the sympathetic characters in The Grass Harp. The Judge further defines for the group their role in life, as spirits, or persons willing to grant differences in human behavior. He recalls, too, how he once almost had to imprison a man because that man defied custom and wanted to marry a black woman he loved. He reveals that his family views him as scandalous because he once maintained a long, friendly correspondence with a lonely thirteenyear-old girl in Alaska. Capote sketches a variety of townspeople some curious types, others mean and petty. There are the owners of the Katydid Bakery, Mr. and Mrs. C. C. County, and there is the traveling evangelist Sister Ida, the mother of fifteen children, one of whom is a star in her religious show and regularly lassoes souls for Christ. Ultimately, Sister Idas troupe joins forces with the tree-house group in a battle with the towns conformist faction. A reconciliation becomes possible when Dolly realizes that she truly is needed by her sister, Verena. Verena, by this time, has been robbed of her cash and bonds by the smooth-talking Dr. Ritz, whom she had hoped to marry. The last sections of the work deal with the maturing of Riley Henderson, his falling in love, and his eventual marriage to Maude Riordan. As Collin also matures, he plans to go away to law school and thus leave the town. Dolly, Verena, and Catherine Creek live together until a stroke kills Dolly, after which Catherine retires to live in seclusion in her own cabin. As Collin prepares to leave the town, he notes that the town remainslike the stories of the people in itin memory. The Grass Harp reverberates with themes of alienation, loneliness, and the search for a secure and meaningful place in life, ideas Capote used in Other Voices, Other Rooms and was later to employ in Breakfast at Tiffanys.

Breakfast at Tiffanys
First published: 1958 Type of work: Novella A romantic, nonconformist runaway seeks glamour, self-identity, and freedom in Manhattan during World War II.

Breakfast at Tiffanys is a first-person narrative with a young male writer as its single point of view. The narrator relates what he observes of the life and experiences of Holly Golightly, a young Texas woman who has come to New York in the early 1940s seeking new life, excitement, and glamour, which she feels is in keeping with her freewheeling, sometimes irresponsible, approach to life. Like Other Voices, Other Rooms, which preceded it, Breakfast at Tiffanys presents a free-spirited person trying to escape from the tawdry aspects of a past life by finding a lifestyle more compatible with her dreams and fantasies. Capotes story of Holly develops as a remembrance triggered in the writernarrators memory by an encounter with a Lexington Avenue bar proprietor, Bell, who had known Holly as a frequent and colorful patron of his bar. Bell reports to the narrator that Holly in 1956 may have been seen in East Anglia, in Africa, where a Japanese photographer (who also had known Holly in New York) has encountered a wooden replica of Hollys face in a remote native village. The writer then recalls his first encounter with Holly when he had rented an apartment in the same building as she (and the photographer) during the early years of World War II. The writer (whom Holly calls Fred, after her brother, who is in the military service) grows more familiar with the irrepressible Holly after their first meeting. He finds that she views life essentially as a continuing party; some noisy parties occur in Hollys apartment. Holly first met the writer as she slid into his apartment from the fire escape one

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Truman Capote evening. He soon learns that Holly plays host to a wide assortment of mostly male friends, ranging from soldiers to Hollywood agents to an occasional gangster. Holly also is a regular visitor to Sing Sing Prison, where she is a paid messenger for a gangster named Sally Tomato. Holly is a vivacious blond who speaks in a kind of butchered French-English, which is her attempt at city sophistication. Holly fascinates everyone who meets her: the young writer, her former agent, the bar owner, a rich playboy named Rusty Trawler, and a handsome Brazilian, Jose Ybarra-Jaegar, whom she hopes to marry. Holly is, in effect, a kind of freespirited earth goddess, the kind of myth men tend to worship, a myth suggested by the wooden carving in the storys opening. The freedom to love as one desires is one of Hollys obsessions. She tells the narrator that she believes people should be allowed to marry as they like, either male or female. In another conversation, she expresses her openminded attitude toward lesbians and even considers taking in a lesbian roommate. She further reveals that she is attracted to older men (such as Wendell Willkie) but that she could as easily be interested in, ideally, Greta Garbo. The novella is a slowly unfolding character study of Holly through a series of episodic events: her parties; her free lifestyle; her taking in a model, Mag Wildwood, as a roommate; the visit of her older Texas husband, Doe; her aspirations to marry the rich Brazilian Ybarra-Jaegar; and her arrest and scandal because of her associations with Sally Tomato. Most important of all these casually related events is the sudden death of Hollys brother, Fred, killed in overseas combat. Faced with scandal and the end of her planned marriage, Holly, at the end of the story, leaves New York, abandoning her only commitmentthe pet cat with no nameand heads to South America to seek further that glamorous place of safety for which she yearns. The books title is a symbol of that search; Holly likes the environment of Tiffanys jewelry store in New York, because nothing bad (she thinks) could happen to anyone there. A quiet, assured place of the security, wealth, and glamoura place of calm belongingthat Holly so desperately seeks, she sees it as an alternative to the despair that grips her, the depression she calls the mean reds. Although frivolous and exasperating to those who know her, Holly Golightly (her name obviously suggests her attitude toward life) captivates all who meet her so that, in their minds, she takes on the substance of an elusive mythic dream, her appeal carved in their memories just as it was in the African wooden figure.

In Cold Blood
First published: 1966 Type of work: Nonfiction novel A Kansas farm family is mysteriously murdered by two ex-convicts who flee the scene but are eventually captured, tried, and executed.

In Cold Blood was created as a work of deliberate literary experiment. Having written extensive journalistic coverage in his account of an opera companys tour of the Soviet Union (The Muses Are Heard) and in various travel writing, Capote desired to combine the reportorial techniques of journalismthe gathering of detailed factual material by observation and interviewingwith the narrative and dramatic scene devices of fiction. The grisly, senseless murders of a Kansas farm family (Herbert W. Clutter, his wife, and two children) on November 15, 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas, provided the opportunity for the writer to try his experiment. In Cold Blood is a documented record of those murders, but it is also a documentation of the backgrounds, motives, attitudes, and perspectives of hundreds of local townspeople as well as those of the two killers, ex-convicts Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith, who are arrested eventually for the crime, tried, and executed. Shortly after the crime was committed, Capote went to Kansas to begin the massive accumulation of material that forms the substance of the book. At the outset, the murders were baffling because of the lack of any apparent motive for the slayings. There also were few clues. Initially Capote envisioned his work as a short one in which he would explore the background of the murders and the reaction of the town to them. With the discovery, capture, and confession of the two killers, however, Capotes concept changed fo403

Truman Capote cus and became not only a study of the crime and its impact on the local community but also an investigation into the lives and motives of the two killers. While describing present actionthe arrest, incarceration, trial, and conviction, then the appeals process. and finally the execution by hanging in Lansing, Kansas, in 1965Capote also delves back into the murderers pasttheir families, aspirations, and personal defeats. Writing the book took more than six years. The organization of the material was ingeniously handled. Capote once said he had taken more than six thousand pages of notes. The book has four sections, all of which offer the reader shifts in time and place, rather like the cinematic technique of parallel editing, thus allowing the reader to experience simultaneous events with different persons in different locales. The four sections are titled The Last to See Them Alive, Persons Unknown, Answer, and The Corner. In the first section, Capote traces the members of the Clutter family through their activities on the last day of their lives, going through their routine in remarkable detail (even clothing is noted, as is music heard on the radio.) While following the family, Capote also allows the readers to follow the ongoing progress of the two killers, Dick and Perry, as they move inexorably toward their victims in Kansas. The shifts between the killers activities and those of their intended victims come to seem as fatalistic as Greek tragedy, and they add to the sense of tension and suspense (even though the reader is aware of the outcome of the impending meeting). Capote further heightens the readers sense of dramatic anticipation by having section 1 end with the discovery of the bodies by local people. He carefully withholds the actual murder scenes until much later in the work; once the killers have been captured, the murder scenes are revealed in their confessions. Part 2 catalogs the investigation of the crimes and the towns reaction to them. Against the ongoing investigation, the reader also follows the travels of Dick and Perry as they flee from Kansasfirst to Mexico, later to Florida, and eventually back to Texas. As the authorities try to find leads to what seems a motiveless act, the reader sees the murderers as they fish, drink, and go to beaches. Capote also begins to introduce background information about the killers. A letter by Perrys father is included, as are a letter from Perrys sister written to him in prison and another convicts lengthy commentary on her letter. These revelations are juxtaposed against the frustration of investigator Alvin Dewey as he tries to find leads in the case. Part 3, Answer, brings the break in the case: A convict in prison reveals that Dick Hickock once told him of a plan to rob the Clutter household and leave no witnesses. As the net draws slowly about the killers after that revelation, the reader is given a sadly humorous episode in which a young boy and his ailing grandfather are given a ride by the murderers. The meeting of the open, honest, goodnatured child with the killers is an example of how Capote has skillfully manipulated his material for maximum ironic effect. The killers join with the boy in a game to find empty soft-drink bottles in the barren Texas countryside. Part 4 deals with events after Dick and Perrys arrest: their trial and conviction, the innumerable appeals in the courts as they seek to avoid execution, and, finally, their deaths by hanging in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Of particular interest in this section of the book is Capotes study of Dick and Perrys time on death row and his look at the lives of others who were death-row prisoners at the same time. Capotes book does not end with the hanging of Dick and Perry; instead, there is a tranquil scene back in Holcomb, at the cemetery where the Clutter family is buried. Detective Alvin Dewey visits the graves and, while there, meets a young girlfriend of the Clutter girl. Their talk is routineabout school, college plans, marriages, hopes, aspirations, ambitions, the stuff of everyday life. These are exactly the details of routine life that have been denied the Clutter family and, indeed, their killers, by the tragic turns that fate works in peoples lives. With the contrast between retribution and innocent hope, the books final irony is eloquently achieved.

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Summary
Capote frequently depicted isolated, alienated personalities engaged in a desperate pursuit of love, seeking a place of security and belonging. That search is seen in the plights of characters as varied as Joel Sansom, Holly Golightly, and Judge Cool and the tree dwellers of The Grass Harp; it is found even in the real-life personalities of the killers in In Cold Blood. The sense of personal desolation and anxiety is depicted with varying styles; Capotes early work has a romantically dense and suggestive metaphorical style, whereas later in his career he developed the stylized but factually based approach that he called the nonfiction novel. All writing, Capote often said, like all art, has at its center a perfectly wrought core and shape. It is this distilled essence in his writing, coupled with his theme of the individually bruised soul seeking safety, that gives his works their almost unbearable tension. Jere Real

Discussion Topics
How do the mysterious details of setting
and the various eccentric characters contribute to the characterization of Joel in Other Voices, Other Rooms?

Discuss the following assertion: Truman

Capotes insistence on the originality of his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, enhanced its popular success but misdirected criticism of the work.

What did Capote ultimately learn and reveal about the motivation of the killers in In Cold Blood?

Are there important mutually exclusive

values in journalism and fiction? Has Capote been a bad influence on the recent journalists who have betrayed journalistic standards by incorporating fictitious material in their reports?

Does Capotes literary output after In Cold

Bibliography
By the Author long fiction: Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948 The Grass Harp, 1951 A Christmas Memory, 1956 (serial) The Thanksgiving Visitor, 1967 (serial) Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, 1986 short fiction: A Tree of Night, and Other Stories, 1949 Breakfast at Tiffanys: A Short Novel and Three Stories, 1958 One Christmas, 1983 I Remember Grandpa: A Story, 1986 The Complete Collected Stories of Truman Capote, 2004

Blood demonstrate that celebrityand especially his practice of cultivating his own celebritydamaged his integrity as an artist?

What work of Capotes do you think best illustrates his conviction that all writing has at its center a perfectly wrought core and shape? Describe the core of that work.

drama: The Grass Harp: A Play, pr., pb. 1952 (adaptation of his novel) House of Flowers, pr. 1954 (with Harold Arlen) screenplays: Beat the Devil, 1954 (with John Huston) The Innocents, 1961 nonfiction: Local Color, 1950 The Muses Are Heard, 1956 405

Truman Capote Observations, 1959 (with Richard Avedon) In Cold Blood, 1966 The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places, 1973 miscellaneous: Selected Writings, 1963 Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia, 1969 (with Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry) Music for Chameleons, 1980 A Capote Reader, 1987 Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, 2004 (edited by Gerald Clarke) About the Author Bloom, Harold, ed. Truman Capote. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Brinnin, John Malcolm. Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy. Rev. ed. New York: Delacorte Press, 1986. Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Dunphy, Jack.Dear Genius: A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989. Garson, Helen S. Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Rudisill, Marie. The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote. Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 2000. Windham, Donald. Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others. New York: William Morrow, 1987.

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