Truman Capote

Born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Truman Capote endured a childhood of almost novelistic dysfunction: his parents divorced when he was four, his mother sent him to live with elderly relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, where his closest companion was the girl next door, Harper Lee. He later took the surname of his mother’s second husband, a Cuban-born businessman named Joseph Garcia Capote. By the age of eight he had decided to become a writer, and by seventeen he had dropped out of school and talked his way into a job at The New Yorker. His first published story, “Miriam” (1945), won an O. Henry Award and led to a contract with Random House, whose publisher Bennett Cerf recognized the prodigy. Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Southern Gothic debut novel, made him famous at twenty-three, in part because of the reclining photograph on its dust jacket, which became one of the most talked-about author portraits of the century. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), a novella about the enigmatic Holly Golightly, cemented his place in popular culture. Then came In Cold Blood (1966), his account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas , a work he called a “nonfiction novel,” pioneering the form later known as New Journalism and widely considered a masterpiece of American prose. The book’s success, however, marked the beginning of his undoing; he never completed another major work. His later years were consumed by alcohol, drugs, and the fallout from “La Côte Basque, 1965” (1975), a thinly veiled portrait of his high-society friends that earned their permanent exile. He died on August 25, 1984, in Los Angeles, at the home of Joanne Carson.

On November 28, 1966, weeks after In Cold Blood made him rich and famous, Capote threw the Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel: five hundred guests in masks honoring The Washington Post's Katharine Graham, dancing until scrambled eggs and champagne were served at midnight. It is still called the party of the century.