Truman Capote

Capote, Truman (b. Truman Persons)

(1924–84) writer; born in New Orleans. He took his stepfather's surname in childhood. A high school dropout, he came to New York City in 1942 and worked for awhile as an office boy at The New Yorker. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), launched a literary career that peaked with his innovative "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966). Resident in New York and Switzerland, he cultivated celebrity and was famous in later years for his jetsetting lifestyle as well as his writing.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Capote, Truman

 

Born Sept. 30, 1924, in New Orleans. American writer.

Capote began his literary career writing screenplays and short stories. The theme of his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) is man’s loneliness in the modern bourgeois world. Capote further developed this theme in his later works: the collections A Tree of Night (1949; some stories translated into Russian, 1967) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958; some stories translated into Russian, 1965) and the short novel The Grass Harp (1953; Russian translation, 1966). These works are characterized by lyricism, stylistic mastery, and close psychological insight. In 1965, Capote published the journalistic novel In Cold Blood (Russian translation, 1966), which sought to reflect the burning issues of reality by uncovering the social and psychological roots of crime. He received an O. Henry Award in 1946, 1948, and 1951.

WORKS

The Thanksgiving Visitor. New York, 1968.
In Russian translation:
Odin iz putei v rai. Moscow, 1967.
Golosa travy. Moscow, 1971.

REFERENCES

Lidskii, Iu. Ia. Ocherki oh amerikanskikh pisateliakh XX v. Kiev, 1968.
Truman Capotes “In Cold Blood”: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif., 1968. (Bibliography, pp. 239–69.)

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.