About+the+Author

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. Of his early days Capote said, “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.”In his mid-teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with his mother and her new husband. Overcome by the life in the city, he dropped out of school, and at age seventeen, got a job with //The New Yorker// magazine. Capote’s first book, //Other Voices, Other Rooms//, was published in 1948. //Other Voices, Other Rooms// had many homosexual themes, and on the cover was a very suggestive photograph of Capote himself. His short novel, //Breakfast at Tiffany’s//, was made into a hit film starring Audrey Hepburn. Capote started to create a new literary genre, non-fiction. //In Cold Blood//, the book that most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the 1959 murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters. Capote left his friends and went to Kansas to go into the small-town life and record the process by which they dealt with the loss of the Clutters. During his stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an involved interview with both. For six years, he was involved in the lives of both the killers and the townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes. //In Cold Blood//, Capote said, “This book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest book. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.” //In Cold Blood// sold out instantly, and became one of the most talked about books of its time. An instant classic, //In Cold Blood// brought its author millions of dollars and fame.