Biography
Introduction
Truman Capote is known for developing "New Journalism," a style of writing that was a cross between journalism and literature. The epitome of this genre is Capote's ground-breaking work of non-fiction, In Cold Blood, published in 1965 and considered the first "so-called news novel" (Connery, 239). Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924 in New Orleans, Louisiana to Lillie Mae and Arch Persons.
According to Gerald Clarke in his book Capote: A Biography, the neglected Truman spent his childhood in various homes and was eventually sent to live with relatives in Monroeville while his parents contemplated divorce (11-15). According to Clarke, in 1930, Monroeville was “a small town, scarcely more than a furrow between fields of corn and cotton. That year’s census listed 1,355 people, but even that tiny figure was exaggerated by local officials who wanted a number big enough to qualify for a post office” (18). His childhood companion there was Harper Lee, a next-door-neighbor.
First novel
Lee’s father, a state senator, was also a lawyer and former owner and editor of the Monroe Journal (21-22). In his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman based the character Idabel Thompkins on his friend Harper Lee. When Lee wrote her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960, she used Capote to create her character Dill Harris. In 1932, Truman moved to New York to live with his mother and her new husband, Joe Capote, whom she had met and married shortly after leaving Truman’s father, Arch. On February 14, 1935, Truman’s name was officially changed to Truman Garcia Capote (Clarke, 34).
Capote took a job at The New Yorker magazine, first in the accounting department and then in the art department, where he cataloged cartoons and news clips. Later, he moved up to writing for the column "Talk Of The Town." During this time, he began to read lots of movie scripts and worked as a freelance writer (Garson, 3). Between 1946 and 1950, The New Yorker published nine travel articles by Capote. One of Capote's travel articles was a journalistic account of an American theatrical troupe's tour of Russia called "The Muses Are Heard" (Connery, 239-240).
Many literary critics did not consider Capote's fiction noteworthy because of its "unrealistic characters, fanciful plots, and indifference to moral issues." Other critics just called it simple romance (Garson, 6-7). Many critics dismissed his fiction because they expected Southern writers to use gothic elements. "Unlike Faulkner or Tate, [Capote] is not concerned with struction...downfall...or decay..." His work was called "decorative" (Garson, 13). His first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," was also not a favorite of the critics because of its homosexual themes, which were taboo in American works of the time (Garson 14).
Elements of New Journalism
One of Capote's travel articles was a journalistic account of an American theatrical troupe's tour of Russia called "The Muses Are Heard" (Connery, 239-240). He also did a satirical piece on Marlon Brando in 1957 called "The Duke In His Domain," which strongly upset the actor. It was during the creation of this work that Capote began to develop an unusual style of interviewing which he mastered in In Cold Blood. It was a technique Capote called "the secret to the art of interviewing."
Capote's secret was to tell his subject a considerable amount of information about himself, which reversed the roles and gave the subject the feeling of being the interviewer. Then the subject would lose inhibition and share his story with Capote (Connery 241-242). He also began to record details of interviews in his mind, without the use of traditional resources.
This much-discussed 1947 Harold Halma photo on the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) was a key factor in Capote's rise to fame during the 1940s.
Interview with writer George Plimpton
"Twelve years ago I began to train myself...to transcribe conversation without using a tape-recorder. I did it by having a friend read passages from a book, and then later I'd write them down to see how close I could come to the original. I had a natural facility for it, but after doing these exercises for a year and a half, for a couple of hours a day, I could get within 95 percent of absolute accuracy, which is as close as you need," said Capote in an interview with writer George Plimpton.
Capote began to idealize a writing style with a unique formula. Tom Wolfe, a contemporary of Capote, defined this new style as "reporting that read like fiction." He identified four common narrative techniques that characterized the style: 1) detailed scene construction 2) complete dialogue from interviews instead of subjective quotes 3) point-of-view variation, and 4) details about the characters in the story (Connery, 3).