Truman Capote

Truman Capote was an American writer, playwright, and actor.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans and lived there until the age of eighteen. At the age of four, before he even entered school, Truman learned to read. By the age of eight, he had begun writing stories, and by the time he was eleven, according to his own account, he was already writing six to nine hours a day. Critics even believe this is true, because at the age of ten he won a prestigious award for a short story.

In 1933, he moved with his mother and stepfather to New York. While attending high school, Capote wrote for the school newspaper and for a literary magazine. At seventeen, he dropped out of college, saying that they were not teaching him anything there and were only taking up the time he could have spent writing. Capote began working at The New Yorker, where he learned the inside story of the publishing world.

He began his literary career with the story “Miriam,” published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1945. And in 1948, he received an award for the story “Shut a Final Door.” Soon Truman Capote published his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms. The book became a bestseller, and Truman’s career rapidly took off.

One of Capote’s most popular works is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book that, in addition to the title novella, includes three short stories. But the greatest fame was brought to him by In Cold Blood. In 1959, after reading a note about the murder of a family in Kansas, Capote suggested to The New Yorker editor William Shawn that they publish a series of articles about the killers. He then spent six years gathering material for his major bestseller, a nonfiction account of the criminals Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, following the way his characters moved closer to death. After the execution of the criminals, Capote complained to Harper Lee that he had been unable to do anything for these people. “Maybe,” Harper replied, “but in fact you didn’t want to do anything.” However, In Cold Blood brought the writer about four million dollars (Truman spent seventy thousand of that on a tombstone for his heroes). Capote became a living classic. But he wanted more: to be the leading social