66 Facts About Truman Capote

Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor.

Truman Capote's works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas.

Truman Capote had discovered his calling as a writer by the time he was eight years old, and he honed his writing ability throughout his childhood.

Truman Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home.

Truman Capote spent six years writing the book, aided by his lifelong friend Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Lillie Mae Faulk and salesman Archulus Persons.

Truman Capote's parents divorced when he was two, and he was sent to Monroeville, Alabama, where, for the following four to five years, he was raised by his mother's relatives.

Truman Capote formed a fast bond with his mother's distant relative, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom Truman called "Sook".

In Monroeville, Truman Capote was a neighbor and friend of Harper Lee, who would go on to become an acclaimed author and a lifelong friend of Truman Capote's.

Truman Capote was often seen at age five carrying his dictionary and notepad, and began writing fiction at age 11.

Truman Capote was given the nickname "Bulldog" around this age.

In 1939, the Capote family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Truman attended Greenwich High School, where he wrote for both the school's literary journal, The Green Witch, and the school newspaper.

Truman Capote was called for induction into the armed services during World War II, but he later told a friend that he was "turned down for everything, including the WACS".

Truman Capote later explained that he was found to be "too neurotic".

Truman Capote based the character of Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on his Monroeville, Alabama, neighbor and best friend, Harper Lee.

Truman Capote's father was a lawyer, and she and I used to go to trials all the time as children.

Truman Capote began writing short stories from around the age of 8.

In 2013, the Swiss publisher Peter Haag discovered 14 unpublished stories, written when Truman Capote was a teenager, in the New York Public Library Archives.

Truman Capote's stories were published in both literary quarterlies and well-known popular magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Magazine, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and Story.

Some time in the 1940s, Truman Capote wrote a novel set in New York City about the summer romance of a socialite and a parking lot attendant.

Truman Capote later claimed to have destroyed the manuscript of this novel; but 20 years after his death, in 2004, it came to light that the manuscript had been retrieved from the trash back in 1950 by a house sitter at an apartment formerly occupied by Truman Capote.

Truman Capote described this symbolic tale as "a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion".

Truman Capote sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window.

Truman Capote claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Truman Capote looked "as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality".

The Broadway stage revue New Faces featured a skit in which Ronny Graham parodied Truman Capote, deliberately copying his pose in the Halma photo.

Truman Capote co-wrote with John Huston the screenplay for Huston's film Beat the Devil.

The heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly, became one of Truman Capote's best known creations, and the book's prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Truman Capote "the most perfect writer of my generation".

An outraged Truman Capote resold the novella to Esquire for its November 1958 issue; by his own account, he told Esquire he would only be interested in doing so if Attie's original series of photos was included, but to his disappointment, the magazine ran just a single full-page image of Attie's.

For Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's was a turning point, as he explained to Roy Newquist :.

Rather than taking notes during interviews, Truman Capote committed conversations to memory and immediately wrote quotes as soon as an interview ended.

Lee made inroads into the community by befriending the wives of those Truman Capote wanted to interview.

Truman Capote recalled his years in Kansas when he spoke at the 1974 San Francisco International Film Festival:.

The "nonfiction novel", as Truman Capote labeled it, brought him literary acclaim and became an international bestseller, but Truman Capote would never complete another novel after it.

Truman Capote has told exceedingly well a tale of high terror in his own way.

One of his first serious lovers was Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin, who won the National Book Award for his Herman Melville biography in 1951 and to whom Truman Capote dedicated Other Voices, Other Rooms.

However, Truman Capote spent the majority of his life until his death partnered to Jack Dunphy, a fellow writer.

Truman Capote was well known for his distinctive, high-pitched voice and odd vocal mannerisms, his offbeat manner of dress, and his fabrications.

Truman Capote often claimed to know intimately people whom he had in fact never met, such as Greta Garbo.

Truman Capote professed to have had numerous liaisons with men thought to be heterosexual, including, he claimed, Errol Flynn.

Truman Capote traveled in an eclectic array of social circles, hobnobbing with authors, critics, business tycoons, philanthropists, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty, and members of high society, both in the US and abroad.

When Truman Capote confronts the Trillings on the train, he attacks their identity as literary and social critics committed to literature as a tool for social justice, capable of questioning both their own and their society's preconceptions, and sensitive to prejudice by virtue of their heritage and, in Diana's case, by her gender.

Now more sought after than ever, Truman Capote wrote occasional brief articles for magazines, and entrenched himself more deeply in the world of the jet set.

Truman Capote was commissioned to write the teleplay for a 1967 television production starring Radziwill: an adaptation of the classic Otto Preminger film Laura.

On November 28,1966, in honor of The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, Truman Capote hosted a now-legendary masked ball, called the Black and White Ball, in the Grand Ballroom of New York City's Plaza Hotel.

Truman Capote dangled the prized invitations for months, snubbing early supporters like fellow Southern writer Carson McCullers as he determined who was "in" and who was "out".

The dearth of new prose and other failures, including a rejected screenplay for Paramount Pictures's 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, were counteracted by Truman Capote's frequenting of the talk show circuit.

In 1972, Truman Capote accompanied The Rolling Stones on their first American tour since 1969 as a correspondent for Rolling Stone.

Truman Capote ultimately refused to write the article, so the magazine recouped its interests by publishing in April 1973 an interview of the author conducted by Andy Warhol.

In July 1973, Truman Capote met John O'Shea, the middle-aged vice president of a Marine Midland Bank branch on Long Island, while visiting a New York bathhouse.

Longtime friends were appalled when O'Shea, who was officially employed as Truman Capote's manager, attempted to take total control of the author's literary and business interests.

Truman Capote spoke about the novel in interviews, but continued to postpone the delivery date.

Truman Capote permitted Esquire to publish four chapters of the unfinished novel in 1975 and 1976.

The fallout from "La Cote Basque 1965" saw Truman Capote ostracized from New York society, and from many of his former friends.

One year later, when he felt betrayed by Lee Radziwill in a feud with perpetual nemesis Gore Vidal, Truman Capote arranged a return visit to Stanley Siegel's show, this time to deliver a bizarrely comic performance revealing an incident wherein Vidal was thrown out of the Kennedy White House due to intoxication.

Truman Capote went into salacious details regarding the personal life of Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Truman Capote underwent a facelift, lost weight and experimented with hair transplants.

Truman Capote died in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on August 25,1984.

Truman Capote died at the home of his old friend Joanne Carson, ex-wife of late-night TV host Johnny Carson, on whose program Capote had been a frequent guest.

Truman Capote was cremated and his remains were reportedly divided between Carson and Jack Dunphy.

Dunphy died in 1992, and in 1994, both his and Truman Capote's ashes were reportedly scattered at Crooked Pond, between Bridgehampton, New York, and Sag Harbor, New York on Long Island, close to Sagaponack, New York, where the two had maintained a property with individual houses for many years.

Crooked Pond was chosen because money from the estate of Dunphy and Truman Capote was donated to the Nature Conservancy, which in turn used it to buy 20 acres around Crooked Pond in an area called "Long Pond Greenbelt".

Truman Capote maintained the property in Palm Springs, a condominium in Switzerland that was mostly occupied by Dunphy seasonally, and a primary residence at 860 United Nations Plaza in New York City.

Truman Capote's childhood is the focus of a permanent exhibit in Monroeville, Alabama's Old Courthouse Museum, covering his life in Monroeville with his Faulk cousins and how those early years are reflected in his writing.

Many of the items in the collection belonged to his mother and Virginia Hurd Faulk, Carter's cousin with whom Truman Capote lived as a child.

Truman Capote's baby blanket is a "granny square" blanket Sook made for him.