OUGD406 - Study Task 01 - Truman Capote

Truman Capote:

1.  Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor, many of whose short stories, novels and plays are recognised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). Many of his novels and plays have been adapted into films and television dramas. Capote earned most of his fame for his journalistic work, In Cold Blood, about the murder of a family in their Kansas farmland home, which he spent four years writing alongside his friend Harper Lee who wrote the 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

2.  Capote and Lee were childhood friends, living next door when he was sent away by his mother to live with his aunts and cousins. Years later, Lee put Capote into her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, as the character of Dill Harris. In the period Capote and Lee were neighbours, Capote described feeling like "a spiritual orphan, like a turtle on its back".

''I was so different from everyone, so much more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive. I was having fifty perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.''

3.  The ashes of Truman Capote were sold at an auction in September 2016, in Los Angeles for $43,750. These were kept in a carved Japanese wooden box, which belonged to the late Joanne Carson, who was good friends with Capote. It was said his ashes brought her "great comfort". Capote loved to create press opportunities during his lifetime and to read his name in the paper so putting his ashes up for auction was used as a way of honouring him and continuing his adventures.

4.  Capote had a recurring dream, which took place backstage at a theatre. He once told in an interview "I have a very important part to play. The only trouble is that I'm in a panic because I don't know my line... Finally, the moment comes. I walk onstage, but I just stumble about, mortified."

5.  During his early years, Capote lived with distant relatives in Alabama, one of which made him his own baby blanket. Capote carried this around with him even into his adulthood and reportedly even had the blanket on the day he died.