Truman Capote - Salem Press

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 boy’s propensity for
fantasy invention. He was later to recall Sook as
the doting parent surrogate in his short story “A
Christmas Memory.”
Capote’s 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-
Truman Capote
Born: New Orleans, Louisiana
September 30, 1924
Died: Los Angeles, California
August 25, 1984
Capote’s 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.”
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 boy’s 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 Tiffany’s (1958), loved the
pace, sophistication, and glamour of New York.
Capote’s 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 Capote’s 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 Harper’s 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 childhood—sensitive, abandoned,
and isolated. The book was, he said, an
emotional, or spiritual, autobiography, if not an actual
literal one. The novel’s romanticized treatment
of a homosexual theme made it a sensation in
the late 1940’s, when only one other contemporary
novel, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948),
had dealt with homosexuality. The controversy
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over Capote’s 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 1950’s, 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 company’s
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 Tiffany’s, which further enhanced
his reputation as a fiction writer. An equally
popular film version of the novella followed in
1961.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Capote applied his talents
to other literary forms, adapting two of his
works for the theater—his 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 James’s gothic novella The Turn of the Screw
(1898), released under the title The Innocents
(1961). During the 1960’s, 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.
Capote’s major achievement in the 1960’s, 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 Capote’s 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
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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 à 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 Proust’s monumental Àla
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
1970’s. He wrote in a personal reminiscence, an interview
with himself in his 1980 volume, Music for
Chameleons: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict.
I’m homosexual. I’m 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 writer’s
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 Capote’s death, an extensive
search was made for the missing portions of An-

swered Prayers, those segments the author so often
said that he had completed. No portions of the
work—other than those already published in magazine
installments—were 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.
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 dealer’s 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 writing—and its accompanying
pain of creation—Capote 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 outsider’s perspective is—simply because
it is detached from the observed society—more
comprehensive. As he was an artist “outside,” it was
natural that Capote’s works often dealt with the
Truman Capote
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 outsider’s
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
person’s 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.
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 life’s differences.
Some of the more flamboyant examples of the
free, nonconforming spirit are seen in Capote’s 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 Joel’s boyhood homosexual
longings. Another such unconventional
personality is Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
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. Holly’s defiance
of convention is as meaningful as Joel’s and
Idabel’s or, for that matter, the runaways in The
Grass Harp, whose tree house retreat is Capote’s
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 killers—particularly Perry Smith—
of In Cold Blood the man he might have become had
his own life taken a different turn. His realization
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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 couldn’t see that he had “a lot to live
for.” Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep
in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasure—such
dreams were gone. Gone, too, was “Perry O’Parsons,”
the name invented for the singing sensation
of stage and screen that he’d half-seriously hoped
some day to be.
In Capote’s 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 Cool’s 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 good—that 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, Capote’s first published
long work, is a moody and atmospheric tale characterized
both by its strange setting—a decaying
mansion in rural Mississippi—and by the host of
peculiar characters it presents to the reader.
The book details the encounters of thirteen-
400
year-old Joel Knox Sansom, who travels to an old
mansion, Skully’s 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 Café” both have
grotesque situations and characters), and Flannery
O’Connor (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 naïveté of Joel.
When Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, he meets
a variety of unusual characters: an ancient black
man, Jesus Fever; Jesus Fever’s granddaughter, a
twenty-one-year-old cook named Missouri (nicknamed
“Zoo”); Joel’s father, the bedridden invalid
Edward Sansom (who communicates with the rest
of the household by rolling red tennis balls down
the stairs); his father’s 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 Capote’s work
see Idabel as Capote’s fictional version of his own
childhood friend, Harper Lee.)
While the main plot of the book appears to be
dealing with Joel’s 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, Joel’s homosexual older rela-

tive, still laments the loss of his great love, a boxer
named Pepe Alvarez, and Miss Amy has married
Joel’s father—even 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 Skully’s Landing to Randolph’s
room to embrace Randolph, leaving behind both
his youth and his own sexual longing.
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, Capote’s 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
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 Collin’s 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 group—has 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 Collin’s 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 group’s
rebellious independence is attractive to others,
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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
town’s authority figures. At one point, the Judge
summarizes the shared plight of the tree’s 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, home—for a
place of real belonging—haunts 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 Ida’s
troupe joins forces with the tree-house group in a
battle with the town’s 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 remains—like the stories of the
people in it—in 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 Tiffany’s.
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s
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 Tiffany’s 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 1940’s 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 Tiffany’s 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. Capote’s story of Holly develops
as a remembrance triggered in the writernarrator’s
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 Holly’s 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
Holly’s apartment. Holly first met the writer as she
slid into his apartment from the fire escape one

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 story’s opening. The freedom to love as
one desires is one of Holly’s 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 Holly’s
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 commitment—the pet cat
with no name—and heads to South America to
seek further that glamorous place of safety for
which she yearns.
The book’s title is a symbol of that search; Holly
likes the environment of Tiffany’s jewelry store in
New York, because nothing bad (she thinks) could
happen to anyone there. A quiet, assured place of
the security, wealth, and glamour—a place of calm
belonging—that 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
Truman Capote
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 company’s
tour of the Soviet Union (The Muses Are
Heard) and in various travel writing, Capote desired
to combine the reportorial techniques of
journalism—the gathering of detailed factual material
by observation and interviewing—with 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, Capote’s concept changed fo-
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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 action—the arrest,
incarceration, trial,
and conviction, then the
appeals process. and finally
the execution by
hanging in Lansing, Kansas,
in 1965—Capote also delves back into the murderers’
past—their 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 reader’s 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 town’s reaction to them. Against the ongo-
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ing investigation, the reader also follows the travels
of Dick and Perry as they flee from Kansas—first 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 Perry’s father is included,
as are a letter from Perry’s sister written to
him in prison and another convict’s 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 Perry’s 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 Capote’s study of Dick
and Perry’s time on death row and his look at the
lives of others who were death-row prisoners at the
same time.
Capote’s 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 routine—about
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 people’s lives.
With the contrast between retribution and innocent
hope, the book’s final irony is eloquently
achieved.

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; itis
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; Capote’s 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
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 Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories, 1958
One Christmas, 1983
I Remember Grandpa: A Story, 1986
The Complete Collected Stories of Truman Capote, 2004
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
Discussion Topics
Truman Capote
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
Capote’s 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 Capote’s literary output after In Cold
Blood demonstrate that celebrity—and especially
his practice of cultivating his own
celebrity—damaged his integrity as an
artist?
What work of Capote’s 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.
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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