Truman Capote
From Philosopedia
Truman Capote (30 Sepember 1924 - 25 August 1984)
Truman Streckfus Persons was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. When he was four, his salesman father and 21-year-old mother divorced and sent the boy to Monroeville, Alabama, to be raised by his mother's relatives. In 1933 he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, Joseph Capote, who in 1935 renamed him Truman Garcia Capote. He attended Greenwich High School in Connecticut, later graduating from a private school in New York City. His mother was a suicide when he was 30.
At the age of 17, he began a two-year job at The New Yorker, one in which he sorted cartoons and clippings of newspapers.
A successful popular write, he received recognition for his vivid use of language. The critic Mark Schorer observed, "Perhaps the single constant in his prose is style, and the emphasis he himself places upon the importance of style."
While staying in her guest room with Joanna Carson, Johnny Carson's former wife, Capote died of liver disease complicated by phlebitis, an inflammation of the veins, and multiple drug intoxication.
Reed, reviewing George Plimpton's Truman Capote, In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, concluded,
- By the end, after Capote has taken an awfully long time to die, there is a distinct feeling of anticlimax, much like his own funeral. Poor Truman. He would have wanted a bash to fit the status he had so desperately sought for himself. But the chairman of the board of the William Morris Agency had a service scheduled same day, same time, and alas, the Morris man got the stars and Capote got their wives. Fearing a low turnout, Capote's loyal friend Carole Matthau pressed John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion into attendance. Dunne gives a brilliant description of the eulogies. A bewildered Artie Shaw began by saying, "I'm not quite sure why I'm here." Artie Deutsch, a neighbor in Palm Springs, stood up and said, "I suppose Truman's life hit its apex with his party, and from then on it was downhill." Dunne nudged Didion and said, "Scratch Artie Deutsch from speaking at my funeral." But however sad and inappropriate the statement may have seemed, it was, of course, the truth.
Capote's interest in religion was next to nil - he was a hedonist who was uninteresed in organized religion or academic philosophy. Of him, Gore Vidal said he had made lying an art. A minor art. And upon hearing that Capote had died, Vidal said, "Good career move."
Selected Works
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948, 1962)
The Muses Are Heard, An Account (1956)
The Grass Harp: and A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1956)
Breakfast at Tiffany's; A Short Novel and Three Stories (1958)
Selected Writings (With an introduction by Mark Schorer, 1963)
In Cold Blood, a True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965, 1966)
The Dogs Bark: Public Peole and Private Places (1973)
Music for Chameleon (1980)
Three by Truman Capote (1985)
I Remember Grandpa: A Story (1985)
Too Brief A Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote (Edited by Gerald Clarke, 2004)
