Truman Capote was born Truman Persons in New Orleans in 1924, the son of Archulus "Arch" Persons and Lillie Mae Faulk. Arch was a fast-talking salesman and dreamer whose official employment was selling Mississippi river boat excursions to clubs and churches, but whose real desire was to strike it rich. His many crackpot schemes--legal and illegal--in pursuit of this fantasy inevitably ended in failure. Eventually his desperate projects carried him ever further outside the law. In 1931, and again in 1932, he was jailed for passing bad checks. Then, in 1934, he was convicted of forging a postal money order--a crime that carried with it a three-year term in the federal penitentiary. Luckily for Arch, however, his sentence was suspended.
Spirited, attractive, and ambitious, Lillie Mae quickly realized the colossal mistake she had made in marrying Arch. Looking elsewhere for consolation, she engaged in dozens of affairs, often with Arch's knowledge and tacit consent. In his turn, Arch sometimes tried to profit from his wife's infidelity, as in his staging of a boxing-match refereed by one of her lovers, the former heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.
"Between Arch's schemes and Lillie Mae's affairs," writes Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, "there was little time for [Truman]. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do." Throughout Truman's childhood, then, his parents' marriage was in a perpetual state of chaos. In addition to being locked in hotel rooms, the boy was frequently exposed to his mother's sexual escapades. "She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis," Capote writes. "We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical."
Beginning in 1928, Truman found himself deposited more and more frequently with relatives while Arch pursued his schemes and Lillie Mae explored her opportunities for career and romance in distant cities. Finally, in 1930, just before his sixth birthday, his parents decided to install him on what looked like a permanent basis in the home of Lillie Mae's distant cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. The following year, his mother moved to New York City, thus increasing the boy's sense of abandonment. Except for brief visits with his mother and father, he remained with his Monroeville relatives until his parents' divorce, when he was ten years old. At that time, Lillie Mae won custody of Truman, who then took the last name of his mother's second husband, a Cuban immigrant. After four years in Monroeville, the boy moved to New York and became Truman Capote.
Those years in Alabama were crucial to his development. On the one hand, they were a time of extraordinary loneliness and pain for a child who felt his parents had deserted him. Throughout his adult life, Capote was plagued by intense periods of anxiety which he attributed to this experience of parental neglect.
On the other hand, some of the human connections he made in Monroeville, inside and outside the family, were spiritually nourishing. Among his playmates was Harper Lee, who would later achieve fame as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. She remembered Capote during these years as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies." The two remained friends into adulthood.
Also important to the abandoned boy was his cousin Sook, one of four adults--three sisters and a brother--who presided over the house in Monroeville. The oldest but the least grown-up of the sisters, Sook was close to sixty years old when Truman moved in. Gerald Clarke describes her as "so childlike that she was thought to be retarded by many people; in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded. . . She had never read anything but the Bible and Grimm's fairy tales . . . and she had never been to a movie." Her furthest excursions away from home led her into the surrounding woods to find ingredients for medical cures or to search for the perfect Christmas tree. It was to this odd and unworldly woman that the young Truman looked for the affection his parents failed to provide. She took him under her wing, engaging him in the household chores and local adventures that filled her life. When he finally moved to New York to join the mother about whom he had been fantasizing for four years, he found her emotionally distant, and he pined for his beloved Sook.
On first moving to New York, Capote attended a private academy in Manhattan, but when he neglected his studies his mother sent him away to a military school outside the city. This experience was a complete disaster. His mother, who had renamed herself "Nina," withdrew him from this school and sent him back to the private academy. All the while, Truman had been nurturing an ambition to become a writer, a calling for which he felt formal schooling was unnecessary. When the family moved to Connecticut, he attended Greenwich High School, but failed to graduate with his class, still dismissing his studies as irrelevant. Upon moving back to New York, his parents sent him to another private school, this one for young men with academic problems. Here again, he disregarded his academic work, and instead pursued a life of night-clubbing and urban adventure, gathering materials and experiences for the stories he was beginning to write. At the age of eighteen he landed a job as a copy boy at the New Yorker magazine; by the time he was twenty-one he was publishing fiction in Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar, and working on his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which was published in 1948.
Other well-known works by Capote include the novels The Grass Harp (1951), and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), and a work that he described as a "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood (1965). The latter is a detailed account of the murder of a Kansas farm family, including an exhaustive psychological portrait of their killers. It is Capote's best known work.
He also wrote two pieces for the stage: a 1952 adaptation of The Grass Harp, and an adaptation in 1954 of another of his stories, The House of Flowers. In 1954 he wrote the screenplay for Beat the Devil, a film directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart.
The stories on which Holiday Memories is based were written more than a decade apart. "A Christmas Memory" dates from the year 1956, ten years after Sook's death, while "The Thanksgiving Visitor" was published in 1967.
At the time of his death in 1984, Capote was at work on another novel, Answered Prayers, which remains unfinished.
Spirited, attractive, and ambitious, Lillie Mae quickly realized the colossal mistake she had made in marrying Arch. Looking elsewhere for consolation, she engaged in dozens of affairs, often with Arch's knowledge and tacit consent. In his turn, Arch sometimes tried to profit from his wife's infidelity, as in his staging of a boxing-match refereed by one of her lovers, the former heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.
"Between Arch's schemes and Lillie Mae's affairs," writes Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, "there was little time for [Truman]. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do." Throughout Truman's childhood, then, his parents' marriage was in a perpetual state of chaos. In addition to being locked in hotel rooms, the boy was frequently exposed to his mother's sexual escapades. "She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis," Capote writes. "We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical."
Beginning in 1928, Truman found himself deposited more and more frequently with relatives while Arch pursued his schemes and Lillie Mae explored her opportunities for career and romance in distant cities. Finally, in 1930, just before his sixth birthday, his parents decided to install him on what looked like a permanent basis in the home of Lillie Mae's distant cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. The following year, his mother moved to New York City, thus increasing the boy's sense of abandonment. Except for brief visits with his mother and father, he remained with his Monroeville relatives until his parents' divorce, when he was ten years old. At that time, Lillie Mae won custody of Truman, who then took the last name of his mother's second husband, a Cuban immigrant. After four years in Monroeville, the boy moved to New York and became Truman Capote.
Those years in Alabama were crucial to his development. On the one hand, they were a time of extraordinary loneliness and pain for a child who felt his parents had deserted him. Throughout his adult life, Capote was plagued by intense periods of anxiety which he attributed to this experience of parental neglect.
On the other hand, some of the human connections he made in Monroeville, inside and outside the family, were spiritually nourishing. Among his playmates was Harper Lee, who would later achieve fame as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. She remembered Capote during these years as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies." The two remained friends into adulthood.
Also important to the abandoned boy was his cousin Sook, one of four adults--three sisters and a brother--who presided over the house in Monroeville. The oldest but the least grown-up of the sisters, Sook was close to sixty years old when Truman moved in. Gerald Clarke describes her as "so childlike that she was thought to be retarded by many people; in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded. . . She had never read anything but the Bible and Grimm's fairy tales . . . and she had never been to a movie." Her furthest excursions away from home led her into the surrounding woods to find ingredients for medical cures or to search for the perfect Christmas tree. It was to this odd and unworldly woman that the young Truman looked for the affection his parents failed to provide. She took him under her wing, engaging him in the household chores and local adventures that filled her life. When he finally moved to New York to join the mother about whom he had been fantasizing for four years, he found her emotionally distant, and he pined for his beloved Sook.
On first moving to New York, Capote attended a private academy in Manhattan, but when he neglected his studies his mother sent him away to a military school outside the city. This experience was a complete disaster. His mother, who had renamed herself "Nina," withdrew him from this school and sent him back to the private academy. All the while, Truman had been nurturing an ambition to become a writer, a calling for which he felt formal schooling was unnecessary. When the family moved to Connecticut, he attended Greenwich High School, but failed to graduate with his class, still dismissing his studies as irrelevant. Upon moving back to New York, his parents sent him to another private school, this one for young men with academic problems. Here again, he disregarded his academic work, and instead pursued a life of night-clubbing and urban adventure, gathering materials and experiences for the stories he was beginning to write. At the age of eighteen he landed a job as a copy boy at the New Yorker magazine; by the time he was twenty-one he was publishing fiction in Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar, and working on his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which was published in 1948.
Other well-known works by Capote include the novels The Grass Harp (1951), and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), and a work that he described as a "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood (1965). The latter is a detailed account of the murder of a Kansas farm family, including an exhaustive psychological portrait of their killers. It is Capote's best known work.
He also wrote two pieces for the stage: a 1952 adaptation of The Grass Harp, and an adaptation in 1954 of another of his stories, The House of Flowers. In 1954 he wrote the screenplay for Beat the Devil, a film directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart.
The stories on which Holiday Memories is based were written more than a decade apart. "A Christmas Memory" dates from the year 1956, ten years after Sook's death, while "The Thanksgiving Visitor" was published in 1967.
At the time of his death in 1984, Capote was at work on another novel, Answered Prayers, which remains unfinished.