TRUMAN CAPOTE

“Capote was very ambitious. He didn’t want to simply be a successful

writer, he wanted to be a great writer – the greatest writer of his time. He was
determined. First of all, he believed that he was. He felt that, in terms of
craftsmanship, his writing was superior to others’, though perhaps he had some
doubts about his storehouse of creative imagination.”
(Andreas Brown in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.439)

''I had to be successful, and I had to be successful early,'' Mr. Capote said
in 1978. ''The thing about people like me is that we always knew what we were
going to do. Many people spend half their lives not knowing. But I was a very
special person, and I had to have a very special life. I was not meant to work in
an office or something, though I would have been successful at whatever I did.
But I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and
famous.'' Success, both as a writer and as a celebrity, came early, when he was 23
years old and published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.''
(Albin Krebs – Truman Capote is Dead at 59)

“As an artist, a craftsman, [Truman] is completely sure of himself,”

Linscott told an interviewer in 1948. “As a human being, he has a great need to
be loved and to be reassured of that love. Like other sensitive people he finds the
world hostile and frightening. Truman has all the stigmata of genius. I am
convinced that genius must have stigmata. It must be wounded.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.136)

“He reminded me a little of Ford Madox Ford in that one could not very
well distinguish between what was true and what was not true. He was making
up stories as he told them. They had nothing to do with reality, and that rather
charmed me. There was something naïve about him, which was probably half
natural and half put on. He had a kind of simplicity, which was a real gift. He was
what we call sur-doué, an overly gifted young boy.”
(Jenny Bradley in Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.437)

“His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own
way the Parsons clan were extremely literary. […] Mothers and sons felt
compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which
number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the
South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the
imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with
sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion
and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when
he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a
tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he
could scribble notes.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.49)

“I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and
middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously – that I’m seeing it in one
flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank
God, because surprises, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out
of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer
going […]
I’ve never been aware of direct literary influence, though several critics
have informed me that my early works owe a debt to Faulkner and Welty and
McCullers. Possibly. I’m a great admirer of all three; and Katherine Anne Porter
too. Though I don’t think, when really examined, that they have much in
common with each other, or me, except that we were all born in the South.
Between thirteen and sixteen are the ideal, if not the only ages for succumbing to
Thomas Wolfe, though I can’t read a line of it now. Just as other youthful flames
have guttered: Poe, Dickens, Stevenson. I love them in memory, but find them
unreadable. These are the enthusiasms that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev,
Chekhov, Jane Austen, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust,
Shaw, Willa Cather… oh, the list is too long, so I’ll end with James Agee, a
beautiful writer whose death was a real loss.”
(Truman Capote in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.138/9)

“Capote has been compared to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as having the

toughness of one and the charm of the other. The problems of his life and art also
suggest theirs in numerous ways – drink, despair, writer’s block, sagging careers.
Capote is determined to overcome all these, convinced that he must. For the
artist, he says, there is “the integrity of holding on, holding on to no matter
what.” He will not succumb to his predators, he insists. What matters is to “just
go on doing what you’re doing.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.11/2)

“Flaubert’s attitude toward writing, his sense of perfectionism, is what I

would like mine to be,” Truman said, and his approach to fiction was, like his
French master’s, almost teleological: he knew from start where his characters
were going and what they would do when they got there. He could not
comprehend how some writers he admired – Dickens, for example – could give
in to impulse, letting their pens fly across the page and allowing their characters
to wander down their own, often surprising paths. His own temperament was
such that he had to be in control, and Flaubert’s dictum was his as well: “We
must be on our guard against that feverish state called inspiration, which is often
a matter of nerves rather than muscle. Everything should be done coldly, with
poise.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.223)

“The talent of Truman Capote: that is where we can engage him, all
speculation aside. This small childlike individual, this self-styled, self-made, self-
taught country bot – what did he teach himself? To concentrate: to close out, and
close in: to close with. His writing came, first, from a great and very real interest
in many thing and people, and then from a peculiar frozen detachment that he
practiced as one might practice the piano, or a foot position in ballet. Cultivated
in this manner, his powers of absorption in a subject became very nearly
absolute, and his memory was already remarkable, particularly in its re-creation
of small details. He possessed to an unusual degree this ability to encapsulate
himself within the subject, whatever or whoever it might be, so that nothing else
existed except him and the other; and then he himself would begin to fade away
and his words would appear in his place: words concerning the subject, as though
it were dictating itself.”
(George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.467)

“What started his decline, I believe, was his fear that he’d lost his self-
discipline, and there was no way he could get it back. He’d tell me that in agony
– and this was years before he was writing Answered Prayers – it was to confront
the long legal pad every morning. He said he went through that every day of his
life. He’d think of every excuse possible to avoid it: get up, sharpen fifty pencils,
go back to his pad, make a telephone call. Writing never came to him easily; he
was such a perfectionist: every preposition was of the utmost importance. He was
a purist. Every word was written in his minuscule handwriting.”
(Lee Radziwill in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.361)

“I believe the slide began because when he finished In Cold Blood he

didn’t feel he could ever match it. It was Eileen Simpson who made this remark
to me on Martha’s Vineyard one summer. It suddenly struck me it was very true.
Writers do have a way of realizing when they will not go on, when they will not
do the things for which they have become either famous or admired.”
(Pearl Kazin Bell in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.403)
 In Cold Blood (1965)

“Capote’s career reached its summit when his much heralded book, In
Cold Blood, was published. Because of the widespread interest as well as the
enormous financial success of the book, reviewers spoke of 1966 as belonging to
Capote. The work brought the kind of acclaim that many people had anticipated
for him since his wunderkind years when his first stories were printed in various
magazines.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.1)

“Critical reaction to In Cold Blood varied more than might have been
expected. “The book has been executed without the finesse of which, at his best,
[Capote] has been capable, and it is residually shallow,” wrote Stanley Kaufmann
in The New Republic. F. W. Dupee’s assessment was considerably higher: “In
Cold Blood is the best documentary account of an American crime ever written,”
he said; ‘…for Mr. Capote the [Clutter case] is pristine material; and the book he
has written about it is appropriately and impressively fresh.” William Phillips’
review for Commentary contained a more mixed reaction: “Perhaps I can best
sum up my response to the book by saying that when I finished it I thought it was
good in its own way, but that the question remained – as in the old Jewish joke –
whether In Cold Blood was good for literature… it is a good story, competently
though too mechanically told, its smooth, standardized prose and somewhat
contrived shifting of scenes giving off an aura of fictional skill and urbanity and
imaginative recreation. In Cold Blood reads like high-class journalism, the kind
of journalism one expects of a novelist.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.118)

“Capote defines In Cold Blood as an innovative art form, to which he has

given the name “nonfiction novel”. Combining journalism with the techniques of
fiction, the work as Capote describes it is imaginative narrative reporting, new
both to journalism and to fiction. An experienced and talented reporter, as
evidenced by his essays and nonfiction books, Capote believes himself to be a
rare example of the creative writer who has taken journalism seriously. Capote’s
claim, however, to have developed a unique art form has been another source of
controversy among literary critics, and the field has been split by those who see
his work as documentary, as fiction, or as art – that is, creative journalism.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.143)

“As he says in his interview, with George Plimpton, he wrote In Cold

Blood without mechanical aids - tape recorder or shorthand book. He memorized
the event and its dialogues so thoroughly, and so totally committed a large piece
of his life to it that he was able to write it as a novel. Yet it is difficult to imagine
such a work appearing at a time other than the electronic age. The sound of the
book creates the illusion of tape. Its taut cross-cutting is cinematic. Tape and
film, documentaries, instant news, have sensitized us to the glare of surfaces and
close-ups. He gratifies our electronically induced appetite for massive quantities
of detail, but at the same time, like an ironic magician, he shows that appearances
are nothing.
In Cold Blood also mocks many of the advances (on paper) of anti-
realism. It presents the metaphysics of anti-realism through a total evocation of
reality. Not the least of the book's merits is that it manages a major moral
judgment without the author's appearance once on stage. At a time when the
external happening has become largely meaningless and our reaction to it
brutalized, when we shout "Jump" to the man on the ledge. Mr. Capote has
restored dignity to the event. His book is also a grieving testament of faith in
what used to be called the soul.”
(Conrad Knickerbocker – One Night on a Kansas Farm)

“While it is possible, even rational, to see the tragic series of events

described in the pages of In Cold Blood as a complex of cause-and-effect
circumstances wherein fate is determined by sheer chance and accident, it is also
possible to view the Clutter murders as the logical outcome of sociological and
psychological forces that had gained gradual momentum over the years. Capote
represents Hickock and Smith as moral perversions of decent men brought about
by the poverty, violence, and ill-luck that reached back for at least one
generation. The Clutter family, by contrast, is also a product of its environment,
except that the family history has been characterized by more positive elements
than those that had permanently scarred the lives of the killers.
It is significant that Capote at no time renders a judgment about the
criminals. His determined disinterest is maintained for at least two reasons: it is
important for the reader to draw his own conclusions about the philosophical-
sociological-psychological circumstances of the mass murder, and Capote was
determined not to interfere with the reader’s judgmental process. He is
nonjudgmental also because of his rather thorough understanding of the
evolution of the killers’ lives. To react with either condemnation or sympathy
would seem, in the context of the book, irrelevant to its basic issues: the reasons
for the crime and how it could have occurred. Capote is primarily concerned with
motivations and circumstances that form an engrossing but inscrutable web of
factors that rendered Smith and Hickock moral invalids, psychopathic criminals.
It becomes evident that questions of condemnation and sympathy toward the
criminals have no real bearing from an objective standpoint ”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.106/7)

“The most obvious advantage of the vignette structure, cinematic or not, is

the way it enables Capote to reinforce the contrast between victims and killers by
repeated jolts from one group to the other, especially in the section preceding the
murders.”
(William L. Nance – The Worlds of Truman Capote, p.188)

“An important aspect of the book’s manner of narration is its reliance

upon a contrapuntal technique involving the contrast of short subsections within
the four main divisions. The contrasts themselves can be seen in more than one
way, as for example contrasts of dark and light, optimistic and tragic, productive
and counterproductive.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.111)

“While Capote can take well-deserved pride in In Cold Blood as a genuine

enlargement of his artistic scope, his deepest satisfaction probably derives from
its being something even more important to him: a vindication of his
imagination. In its portrayal of Perry Smith and in its pervasive theme of
victimization, the book is a factual echo of Capote’s earliest fiction”.
(William L. Nance – The Worlds of Truman Capote, p.218)

“Stendhal found the données of The Red and the Black in a crime story
reported in the press; two of Dostoevsky's major novels sprang from an obscure
grain of literal violence. But with a signal difference, Mr Capote has not written a
novel. He has described In Cold Blood as a "nonfiction novel," as a "fact fiction"
whose narrative imposes fictional techniques on rigorously documentary
material. "All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is
either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons
directly concerned." In other words, In Cold Blood is probably the most
deliberate, the most powerfully thought out product of a movement towards high-
reportage, towards fiction-documentaries which a number of us first identified as
emerging in the United States about twenty years ago (though it had its precedent
in, say, Rebecca West)”.
(George Steiner – A Cold-Blooded Happening)

“No one valued his [Truman’s] rich gifts more than he did himself: there
was no other American of his generation, he felt, who had such a clear ear for the
music and rhythm of the English language, no one else wrote such style and
grace. But the truth of the matter was that until now, he had exercised that style
only in small places. Other Voices, a short novel by any measure, was his longest
piece of writing.
 His Kansas book, on the other hand, would be not only long, but
complicated: he would have to weave together a bewildering collection of
characters, facts, legal explanations and psychological studies. It demanded skills
he had never demonstrated and was not certain – could not be certain – that he
possessed. He was like a composer of string quartets who was nervously
wondering if he was capable of a symphony.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.332)

“It is obvious that In Cold Blood transcends the usual limitations of

journalism, partly because of the shape and structure given it as a part of an
artistic conception. The subsections of the four main parts of the book are often
cameo essays, each with a statement of its own. These smaller units of varied
tone and emphasis are then arranged in a montage of artistic forms. Some of
these subsections are memorably finished pieces of work, such as the one with
which the books ends.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.112)

“In Cold Blood is a classic of mid-century Americana. There is nothing

Capote does not seem to know and to have realised in language of the sounds,
speech-patterns, manners of Holcomb, and of the men both lonely and gregarious
who build the clap-board houses and drive the straight highways under the big
sky. Every detail tells […] In Cold Blood says that America is perhaps the
saddest place on the wide earth, that a civilisation which is today the most
prosperous, energetic, and productive in the world is also full of great stretches of
nothing, that it wastes human possibilities on a formidable scale […] Truman
Capote's observance has left the night-roads of America a little more inhuman,
the automobile grave-yards a little more sinister than he found them. This is a
masterful book.”
(George Steiner – A Cold-Blooded Happening)
 “After six years of the most intensive and thorough research imaginable,
the book was to illustrate a great many things, not the least of which is Capote’s
remarkable talent as raconteur. From another point of view, In Cold Blood is an
extended illustration of the immense possibilities of local color writing,
supremely orchestrated in its progression and tone.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.103)

“My feeling is that for the nonfiction-novel form to be entirely successful,

the author should not appear in the work. Ideally. Once the narrator does appear,
he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line, and the I-I-I intrudes
when it really shouldn't. I think the single most difficult thing in my book,
technically, was to write it without ever appearing myself, and yet, at the same
time, create total credibility […] I could have added a lot of other opinions. But
that would have confused the issue, and indeed the book. I had to make up my
mind and move toward that one view, always. You can say that the reportage is
incomplete. But then it has to be. It's a question of selection, you wouldn't get
anywhere if it wasn't for that […] I make my own comment by what I choose to
tell and how I choose to tell it. It is true that an author is more in control of
fictional characters because he can do anything he wants with them as long as
they stay credible. But in the nonfiction novel one can also manipulate: If I put
something in which I don't agree about I can always set it in a context of
qualification without having to step into the story myself to set the reader
straight.”
(Truman Capote in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.203)

“The execution of the two murderers in Kansas was a terribly traumatic

experience for him. But I don’t think there was any one turning point in his life,
no moment when Truman’s life turned around. If there was, it was the success of
In Cold Blood. It was such an overwhelming success in every way, critically,
financially. I think he lost a grip on himself after that.”
(John Knowles in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.175/6)
 “Capote’s strong sympathy for Perry comes in great measure from a
certain identification with him; the child who dreamed of being famous, a great
entertainer; the man who would always be the size of a twelve-year-old (Capote
himself is very small); the deserted child; the lonely boy; the misfit in society.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.163)

“In Cold Blood is a remarkable book, but it is not a new art form. Like the
picture on the cover of Other Voices, Truman’s claim that it was obscured rather
than spotlighted his achievement. Indeed, the term he coined, nonfiction novel,
makes no sense. A novel, according to the dictionary definition, is a fictitious
prose narrative of considerable length: if a narrative is nonfiction, it is not a
novel; if it is a novel, it is not nonfiction. Nor was he the first to dress up facts in
the colors of fiction.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.359)

“Although some reviewers have criticized the ending as unfitting for a

journalistic work, one must remember that this story is not purely documentary.
Therefore, the ending seems completely appropriate to the artistic intent behind
the novelistic element. Readers, left with a weight of sadness and loss, recognize
that they have been confronted not only with an American tragedy but also the
human tragedy, the wanton as well as the inexplicable nature of existence.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.164)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)

“…in late October, 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was in the bookstores, and
Holly Golightly had already taken her place in America’s fictional Hall of Fame.
Of all his characters, Truman later said, Holly was his favorite, and it is easy to
see why. She lives the Capote philosophy that Randolph and Judge Cool only
talked about in Other Voices and The Grass Harp; her whole life is an expression
of freedom and an acceptance of human irregularities, her own as well as
everybody else’s. The only sin she recognizes is hypocrisy. In an early version,
Truman gave her the curiously inappropriate name of Connie Gustafson; he later
thought better and christened her with one, Holiday Golightly, that precisely
symbolizes her personality: she is a woman who makes a holiday of life, through
which she walks lightly."
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.313)

“Like other Capote’s works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, written in 1958,

received mixed notices. The same critic who said the novel was “among the best
things he has written” later changed his mind and called it “slight”. Another
stated that the earlier fiction of Capote was “much better, truer”. Yet another
found something of Capote’s to praise, and most readers regarded Breakfast at
Tiffany’s as the culminative effort of his daylight stories”.
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.79)

“In technique, Capote drew upon some of the better features of his talent
as a writer, relying as he did on elements of wit, irony of situation and language,
lyricism, precision of feeling achieved through selectivity of detail, and an all-
but-inexhaustible sense of satire. Capote’s handling of wit is facilitated by the
fact that Holly Golightly is one who quite literally lives by her wits.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.88)

“In this book, Truman Capote once again suggests that he is perhaps the
last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers. Here are four Valentines made by his
own hand: a short novel and three stories. They bear his unmistakable touch. The
short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, is a Valentine of love, fashioned by way of
reminiscence, to one Holly Golightly, a "real phony" and one-time inhabitant of a
brownstone in the east Sixties of New York City.”
(William Goyen – That Old Valentine Maker)
 “Like the previous two novel-romances, Breakfast at Tiffany’s can be read
variously. Probably the most salient reading of the book is as a celebration of
innocence and as a mirthful example of the short-circuiting of an essentially
tragic and evil world, as symbolized by the wicked, ugly prospect of Manhattan
and its inhabitants that forms the background for Lulamae, once the wife of Doc
Golightly of Tulip, Texas. Although it is scarcely emphasized, the narrator’s
exposure to Holly has apparently been another step in his education as a writer of
prose fiction.”
(Kenneth T. Reed – Truman Capote, p.91)

“Capote teases the reader with the suspicion that the narrator of Breakfast
at Tiffany’s is himself. There is no doubt about the resemblance, or about the role
of this story in Capote’s gradual transition from fiction to non-fiction. The rather
surprising insertion of Holly’s critique on obviously early-Capote writing may be
a tribute to the real-life girl who seems to have had more influence on his literary
career than all the professional critics put together. For he has followed Holly’s
advice to the letter. Breakfast at Tiffany’s itself fills the prescription that he
abandon brats and trembling leaves, and In Cold Blood has solved the financial
problem.”
(William L. Nance – The Worlds of Truman Capote, p.115)

“Much of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is muted in tone. Although there is a great

deal of humor in a number of episodes, in the dialogue, and in some of the
Damon Runyonesque characters, the liveliness exists inside a frame of memory.
That remembrance has, like many of Capote’s stories, an autumnal sound.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.87)

“Mr. Capote's characteristic resorting to almost vaudevillian devices

weakens his originally serious conception of his character, thins it down and so,
in mid-reading, forces the reader to a dimmer view of her. This kind of genial
philandering runs through all these stories: a tendency to over-glaze situations, to
overdress characters--not stylistically so much as conceptionally - a tendency to
fool with characters on the author's terms of whimsy, not on the characters.
Actually, Mr. Capote indulges in over-acting more than over-writing. In the end,
one imagines this flaw to be more than a matter of showmanship than of writing
craft, one of a lack of full imaginative control.”
(William Goyen – That Old Valentine Maker)

“Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him,” wrote Norman
Mailer. “[…] he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best
sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two
words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.315)

“Holly’s values are those of the Capote-narrator: she is a part of himself

set free like a broken-stringed kite to wander toward an ambiguous land of
dreams and death. Her brief presence is his own breakfast at Tiffany’s, his taste
of the idyll which always vanishes, leaving pain.”
(William L. Nance – The Worlds of Truman Capote, p.123)

“Since her moral code differs from that of society, Holly has no qualms
about lying. To protect herself or to keep people from getting too close, or from
knowing too much about her, she fabricates. She fictionalizes when reality is
grim and threatens to bring on the “mean blues” (sadness), or the “mean reds”
(fear). Unwilling to share her memories of her early life, Holly invents a
beautiful fantasy childhood for herself when the narrator tells her of his own
unhappy boyhood. Holly also lies when a situation is not to her liking.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.82/3)

“Holly’s ideal of love is simply not a sexual one, nor is it likely to be

satisfied by any human being she will meet. The ideal relationship she aspires to
is approximated by the narrator’s own relationship with her: tender but distant,
and consisting largely of admiration for her brilliance and strength. That Holly
makes honesty to self her guiding principle is not surprising when we remember
that on the deepest level she is the Capote-narrator’s alter ego, representing for
him – as Miss Bobbit did for Billy Bob – the strange, unconventional side of
himself.”
(William L. Nance – The Worlds of Truman Capote, p.119)

“Living in the sky is the opposite of breakfasting at Tiffany’s, Holly’s

symbol of the good life. But there is a dichotomy in this. Holly recognizes that
she must find shelter, that she cannot run all her life; yet she also wants freedom.
When she buys the narrator an elegant birdcage he has admired, she makes him
promise that he will “never put a living thing in it.” She has an abhorrence of
cages of any kind. Still Holly longs for a quiet place, somewhere to settle and
make a home.”
(Helen S. Garson – Truman Capote, p.86)

“Truman also talked with Paramount executives about their newest

version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – it had been filmed twice
before – and he was commissioned to write the screenplay for a fee of one
hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. In its structure, which is an extended
flashback, in its brevity, and, most of all, in its elegiac mood, Gatsby has much in
common with The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and he approached the
assignment with some excitement. “Fitzgerald has charm”, he said. “It’s a silly
word, but it’s an exact word for me. I love The Great Gatsby and its sad, gay
nostalgia.”
(Gerald Clarke – Capote. A Biography, p.437)

“…he had a sense of time and place. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example, is
on the one hand a slight book […] On the other hand, if you want to capture a
period in New York, no other book has done it so well. So in that sense he’s a bit
like Fitzgerald. If I were to mount them all up on a wall, I’d put Truman
somewhat below Fitzgerald, but of that ilk. He could capture any period and
place like few others.”
(Norman Mailer in George Plimpton – Truman Capote, p.238)

References

Clarke, G. (1988) – Capote: A Biography, Simon and Schuster: New York

Garson, H. S. (1980) – Truman Capote, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.:
New York
Goyen, W. (1958)– That Old Valentine Maker in New York Times Book
Review, 02/11/1958
Knickerbocker, C. (1966)– One Night on a Kansas Farm in New York
Times Book Review, 6/01/1966
Krebs, A. (1984)– Truman Capote is Dead at 59; Novelist of Style and
Clarity in New York Times Book Review, 28/08/1984
Nance, W. L. (1973) – The World of Truman Capote, Stein and Day
Publishers: New York
Reed, K. T. (1981) – Truman Capote, Twayne Publishers, A Division of G.
K. Hall&CO.: Boston
Steiner, G. (1965) – A Cold-Blooded Happening in The Guardian,
02/12/1965
Plimpton, George (1997) – Truman Capote. In Which Various Friends,
Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, Nan A.
Talese, Doubleday: New York