Truman Capote

Who Was Truman Capote?

Truman Capote was one of the most gifted prose stylists of the twentieth century and the inventor of the nonfiction novel — a form that brought the techniques of literary fiction to bear on real events with consequences for both literature and journalism that are still being worked out. Born in New Orleans in 1924, he had a childhood of extraordinary instability: abandoned by his parents, raised by elderly relatives in Alabama, he found in writing the refuge and the vocation that his family life could not provide.

His early fiction — Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) — established him as a writer of unusual lyrical gifts. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) gave him his most enduring character. But his masterwork is In Cold Blood (1966), the account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the subsequent investigation, trial, and execution of the killers. The book took six years to write and was based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of notes.

Capote is significant for TLA because In Cold Blood raises, with unusual force, the question of evil — specifically, the question of what produces a person capable of murdering an innocent family, and what justice requires in response. His relationship with the killers, particularly Perry Smith, was one of the most morally complex human encounters in American literary history.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Other Voices, Other Rooms — 1948
• The Grass Harp — 1951
• Breakfast at Tiffany's — 1958
• In Cold Blood — 1966
• Music for Chameleons — 1980 — nonfiction