Truman Capote

His parents were barely present. Lillie Mae Faulk and Archulus Persons left him with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, for most of his early childhood, and the person he attached to was his elderly cousin Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom he called Sook and whose face he later compared to Lincoln's — craggy, and kind. The next-door child was Harper Lee, who put him into To Kill a Mockingbird as Dill. He moved to New York in 1932 to live with his mother and a new stepfather, cycled through half a dozen schools, and finished his formal education at 17 with a copy boy's job at The New Yorker — a job that ended when he angered the poet Robert Frost and got fired.

A short story called Miriam brought Random House calling in 1945, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, a Southern Gothic novel published when he was 23, made him famous partly for the book and partly for the reclining author photo on its jacket. Breakfast at Tiffany's followed in 1958. Then, over six years and with Harper Lee working alongside him as a research partner, he built In Cold Blood, a reconstruction of a Kansas farm family's 1959 murder that he called a nonfiction novel, and it made him famous enough to throw the Black and White Ball in 1966. He spent most of his remaining career trying to finish Answered Prayers, an exposé of his own wealthy friends. The chapters he did publish, in Esquire starting in 1975, ended most of those friendships within the year.

The society exile broke something that never mended. He had been drinking and using pills for years, but after 1975 the decline had no brakes — a revoked driver's license in 1980, a seizure that put him in the hospital that same year, brain scans that showed visible shrinkage. He kept promoting Answered Prayers as nearly finished for the rest of his life. He never wrote another chapter of it. His longest relationship, with the writer Jack Dunphy, survived the scandal only by turning platonic, while a later relationship with a banker named John O'Shea, whom Capote made his business manager, ran on mutual heavy drinking. He had been open about being gay since young adulthood, unusually so for the era, and it cost him some of the polite hypocrisy that might otherwise have covered for the addiction.

He died at Joanne Carson's house in Bel Air on August 25, 1984, of liver disease complicated by drug intoxication, and his ashes had an unsettled decade — kept in Carson's bedroom, stolen once from a party and recovered from a garden hose, stolen again years later. In 1994 what remained of him and of Dunphy, dead two years by then, was scattered together at Crooked Pond on Long Island, land the Nature Conservancy had bought with money from his estate. The arguments kept going: whether In Cold Blood invented scenes it claimed were fact, a question true-crime writers still fight over, and whether the wit that built his career was worth what it cost the friends he wrote about.

Truman Capote's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Miriam article
  The short story that brought Random House calling 1945
• Other Voices, Other Rooms book
  A Southern Gothic novel, published at 23 1948
• Breakfast at Tiffany's book
  The novella that created Holly Golightly 1958
• In Cold Blood book
  Six years of research, and the self-described nonfiction novel 1966
• Answered Prayers book
  Unfinished — the Esquire chapters ended his place in society 1975

• September 30, 1924 aged 0 Born in New Orleans as Truman Streckfus Persons
• 1930 aged ~6 Sent to live with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama His childhood friend there, Harper Lee, later modeled Dill on him.
• 1932 aged ~8 Moves to New York to live with his mother and stepfather
• 1948 aged ~24 Publishes Other Voices, Other Rooms
• November 15, 1959 aged 35 The Clutter family is murdered in Holcomb, Kansas The crime that became In Cold Blood.
• 1966 aged ~42 Publishes In Cold Blood
• November 28, 1966 aged 42 Hosts the Black and White Ball
• 1975 aged ~51 Esquire publishes the first Answered Prayers chapter and ends his social life
• August 25, 1984 aged 59 Dies in Bel Air, Los Angeles

• Harper Lee 1926–2016
  Author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that shaped America's conversation on race. childhood friend and In Cold Blood research partner
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. praised his prose
• Tennessee Williams 1911–1983
  Playwright whose A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof defined American theater. close friend, wrote an essay about him
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. made his first New York exhibition from Capote's writing