Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924 to a troubled family.  His mother, Lille Mae, was too childish to handle the responsibilities of motherhood and he rarely saw his father, Archulus Persons, a clerk for a steamboat company.

When he was four years old, his parents divorced.  At that time, his mother left him with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama while she made a life for herself in New York.  Truman’s years in Alabama would later became the material for some of his most sentimental, loving characters, especially the elderly spinster in several of Capote’s novels, stories, and plays.

Lille Mae remarried, this time to a wealthy Cuban businessman named Joseph Capote, and Truman left his life in the South to live with his mother and new stepfather in New York. Joseph Capote adopted young Truman changing his name to Truman Capote.

Capote began writing stories when he was eight years old. He attended Trinity School and St. John’s Academy in New York, and the public schools of Greenwich, Connecticut, but his formal education stopped there.  At seventeen he began working at the The New Yorker.  He attracted as much attention with his attire as he did his writing.

In 1946 he won the O. Henry Award for his short stories. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published in 1948.   Critics were quick to categorize him as a Southern Gothic Writer due to his rich style and dark psychological themes, but Capote proved to be far more complex a writer.  In his later works, his tone is humorous, light, with a touch of sentiment.

It is interesting to note that childhood friend, Harper Lee, portrayed Capote as Dill in her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. “Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him.”

In the 1950s Capote wrote The House of Flowers, a musical set in a West Indies bordello. The following year, in 1951, he published The Grass Harp. In 1958, Capote wrote one of his most famous works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

With his increasing interest in New Journalism and what he called the “nonfiction novel” Capote wrote his bestseller In Cold Blood.  After the publication of In Cold Blood, he switches gears completely writing A Christmas Memory, a sentimental Christmas story based on his upbringing in the South came out in 1956.  He began writing Answered Prayers in the 1970s, and the surviving portions were republished in 1986. In 1981, he published Music for Chameleons, a collection of short pieces, stories, interviews, and conversations published in various magazines. but it remained unfinished.  Three stories from the novel appeared in

While living in Los Angeles, Capote died in 1984 of liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.  A lot has been written about Truman Capote’s life.