Truman Streckfus Persons (later Truman Garcia Capote) was born in New Orleans a hundred years ago. A quintessential liminal Southerner, he lived as the ultimate mid-century New York sophisticate, and died amid the brash celebrity culture of Los Angeles in the 1980s. A multi-talented writer, he produced a dazzling array of novels, articles and short stories as well as his masterpiece, the genre-defining In Cold Blood (1965).
Success came early. At just 22, Capote’s first published short story won a prestigious literary award and snagged him a publishing contract. His critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, with its plethora of classic Southern Gothic tropes, came out in 1948. In it, teenage protagonist Joel Knox searches for love and a way to connect with his absent father in ways that reflect the writer’s own fractured childhood and insecure sense of self. ‘I was loved by my mother and father but I never saw them,’ Capote later noted. ‘In the end, I suppose, everyone has to invent his own world and that’s truly what I did. I invented myself and then I invented a world to fit me’ (Capote in Vreeland 2020).
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