Truman Capote (1924-1984)
Truman Streckfus Persons Southern Gothic novelist, journalist, and celebrated man-about-town authored several great writes giving to us 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and 'In Cold Blood'. "Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."--Capote
Major works of Truman Capote: - Other Voices; Other Rooms (1948)
- The Grass Harp (1951)
- Beat the Devil (1954)
- Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
- In Cold Blood (1965)
Excerpt from Breakfast at Tiffany's When 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' was first published in 1958, 'Time' Magazine described its heroine, Holly Golightly, as "the hottest kitten ever to hit the typewriter keys of Truman Capote. She's a cross between a grown-up Lolita and a teen-age Auntie Mame ...alone and a little afraid in a lot of beds she never made." Of all his characters, Capote later said, Holly was his favorite, and it is easy to see why. This wacky hillbilly-turned-playgirl who lives in a Manhattan brownstone shares not only his philosophy of freedom and acceptance of human irregularities but also his fears and anxieties- "the mean reds' she calls them. For her the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany's; nothing bad could happen, she says, amid "that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets," and her dream is to have breakfast in that soothing setting. "Holly Golightly is outré, funny , touching-and real," remarked 'The Atlantic'. This volume also includes three of Capote's best-known short stories: 'House of Flowers', "A Diamond Guitar", and "A Christmas Memory", which the 'Saturday Review' called "one fo the most moving stories in the language". Excerpt from In Cold Blood I THE LAST TO SEE THEM ALIVE The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see -- simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign -- DANCE -- but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window -- HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches. "Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut."
It was those words, that article, very short and to the point, published in the back of the New York Times that caught Truman Capote's attention and was the driving force in his life for the next six years until the completion of 'In Cold Blood'. His next novel 'Unanswered Prayers' remained unfinished. It would be my guess the two mentioned titles 'Breakfast at Tiffany's and 'In Cold Blood' are the most recognized works of Truman Capote. However, all his works combined give description to him as a Southern Gothic novelist, journalist, and celebrated man-about-town. You can read more about Capote at the following sites online. Books and Writers - Truman Capote - Screen Plays
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/capote.htm
Truman Capote - The Beat Generation
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/capote.htm
Truman Capote - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Capote
Teenreads.com - Author Profile
http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-capote-truman.asp |
