Reading the 20th Century discussion

I used to love a bit of Truman Capote in the 1970s yet have never gone back to him


In the early days of RTTC we read In Cold Blood but I don't recall him coming up again since

Does anyone still read him?

How does his work stand up?

I still love his Breakfast at Tiffany's - I think someone floated the idea of a buddy read?

Capote seems to have become a character in his own right in current culture.

True RC. Long before social media normalised personal branding TC saw himself as his own canvas

This is the dust jacket photo on the first edition of his 1948 debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms

Front cover to another edition...

Those biopics in the mid 2000s probably helped too...


Capote (2005), featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance

Infamous (2006) starring Toby Jones

Both focused on his psychological obsession while writing In Cold Blood

Both portray him as a tragic, Faustian figure who traded a piece of his soul for the resulting book

And recently there's been the interest in his relationships with society women, his so-called 'swans':

Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century

Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball

He's also been the subject of recent fiction:

Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill

The Swans of Fifth Avenue

Swan Song

I haven't read any of these but they're the kind of titles I'd happily pick up from the library on audio if they're available.

Yes, me too, if any are easily accessible on Audio via the library


He feels ripe for reappraisal

I agree Breakfast at Tiffany's is a must read. I've read:
In Cold Blood
The Grass Harp / a Tree of Night
Other Voices, Other Rooms
The story, "A Christmas Memory," collected with Breakfast at Tiffany's in some volumes.

I would like to read Capote by Gerald Clarke and Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill

I think the gossip books about his time in New York would be fun but I think I would want to read the bio first. Some people are piut off by his earlier books since they are so different from Breakfast and In Cold Blood, but they are good if you accept them as they are, though sometimes a bit sentimental for U.K. tastes I think.

Thanks Sam


I grabbed Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Early Stories of Truman Capote* out of the library earlier so will have a look and perhaps read one or all of them. I loved them back in the day


*Written when Truman Capote was in his teens and twenties, these recently-discovered short stories give a rare insight into an American icon. Tales of disappointed lovers, ageing spinsters, hoboes and murderous housewives, of yearning, poverty, despair, compassion, wit and wonder, they show us the boy from Alabama who became one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary voices.

'An intriguing glimpse of Capote as a boy: precocious, provocative, spirited and strange, a "pocket Merlin" spinning tall tales' Olivia Laing, New Statesman