1924
Truman Capote is born
The New Orleans-born writer behind Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood helped blur the line between fiction and reporting.
On September 30, 1924, a boy named Truman Streckfus Persons was born at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. His parents, Lillie Mae Faulk and a salesman named Archulus Persons, later divorced, and as a small child he was sent to Monroeville, Alabama, to be raised by his mother’s relatives. There he grew close to a distant relative he called “Sook” and to the girl next door, Harper Lee, who would become a lifelong friend and, years later, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
He was a lonely, precocious child who taught himself to read and write before starting school and was carrying a dictionary and notepad by the age of five. In 1932 he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, José García Capote, whose surname he took. He never went to college. Instead he worked as a copy boy at The New Yorker and kept writing short stories, and the success of “Miriam” in 1945 earned him a contract with Random House. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, appeared in 1948 and made him famous almost overnight.
A decade later came Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the novella that introduced Holly Golightly. Then, in November 1959, a short newspaper item about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, caught his eye. He traveled there with Harper Lee, interviewed nearly everyone connected to the case, and spent six years on the book that resulted. Rather than take notes, he memorized conversations and wrote them down as soon as each interview ended.
Why it matters
In Cold Blood, serialized in The New Yorker and published as a book in 1966, was what Capote called a “nonfiction novel”: a true crime story told with the techniques of fiction. It became an international bestseller and made him one of the founders of New Journalism, alongside writers such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. It also drew criticism from people in Kansas who said some scenes were invented or embellished, a debate that still follows the genre.
Capote never finished another novel. He became a fixture of high society and television talk shows, and his unfinished Answered Prayers cost him many of his closest friends. He died in Los Angeles on August 25, 1984. His life and work have been the subject of more than 20 films and television productions.
Did you know?
The biographical film Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, opened in the United States on September 30, 2005, which would have been the writer’s 81st birthday.
