American writer whose books include “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” 1948, “In Cold Blood,” 1966 and “Answered Prayers,” 1976. He received the O’Henry Memorial Award at age 18.
Capote grew up in a small town in Alabama, living next door to writer Harper Lee. A slender southern boy, he amused his friends for hours by telling them stories. By age ten, he knew that he was meant to be a writer. With a girlish manner and lisp, he soon entered a homosexual lifestyle.
Capote was forced to fend for himself after his mother, Nina, neglected him to glam it up in New York. His biological father was not in the picture. He attended Trinity school and St. Johns Academy in New York, and his mother married a well-to-do businessman. She later died of a drug overdose. While in his teens he was hired to be a copyboy at the “New Yorker,” publishing his first work at age 16.
Capote’s career began in 1944 when he wrote his first short story, “Miriam.” His first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms” was published in 1948. He then researched for six years to write the book “In Cold Blood. His work on “Answered Prayers” began in 1966, and in 1975, he published the first chapter in Esquire.
Capote was on the whole a charmer, remembering people’s names and tastes years after meeting them and he proved a delightful party animal in the society of noted public figures. At the same time, he made a spectacle of himself on talk shows, babbling about his drug and alcohol problems. He claimed that everyone, male and female, found him irresistible, such as Albert Camus and Errol Flynn. He had the bizarre look of a somewhat pudgy, naughty little boy, and his high-pitched voice could scrape paint. He was starved for the attention that his parents denied him. Capote once went to a conjure woman and asked to be made into a woman. Most of his friends were women, two of them being Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. He was also a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy, and visited the White House on several occasions. He had a relationship for 36 years with his friend Jack Dunphy who inherited the bulk of his estate, $600,000.
Capote was hospitalized in 1983 after tests showed a “toxic level” of Dilantin and Phenobarbital in his system. In 1981 he collapsed in a convulsive seizure. Capote died in his sleep after imbibing a mix of drugs and alcohol on 25 August 1984 in Los Angeles, California.
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