Most Popular Books by Truman Capote

"The thing I like to do most in the world is talk," Capote once said, & talk he does in the more than two dozen interviews collected in this book.

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

The private letters of Truman Capote, lovingly assembled here for the first time by acclaimed Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, provide an intimate, unvarnished portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most colorful and fascinating literary figures. Capote was an inveterate letter writer. He wrote letters as he spoke: emphatically, spontaneously, and passionately. Spanning more than four decades, his letters are the closest thing we have to a Capote autobiography, showing us the uncannily self-possessed naïf who jumped headlong into the post–World War II New York literary scene; the more mature Capote of the 1950s; the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of In Cold Blood; and Capote later in life, as things seem to be unraveling. With cameos by a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century glitterati, Too Brief a Treat shines a spotlight on the life and times of an incomparable American writer.

Most readers know Truman Capote as the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood; or they remember his notorious social life and wild and witty public appearances. But he was also the author of superb short tales that were as elegant as they were heartfelt, as grotesque as they were compassionate. Now, on the occasion of what would have been his eightieth birthday, the Modern Library presents the first collection that includes all of Capote’s short fiction–a volume that confirms his status as one of the masters of this form. Among the selections are “A Tree of Night,” in which an innocent student, sitting on a train beside a slatternly woman and her deaf-mute companion, enters a seductive nightmare that brings back the deepest fears of childhood . . . “House of Flowers,” the inspiration for a celebrated Broadway musical, which tells of a superstitious prostitute who learns to love in a way no one else can ever understand . . . the holiday perennial “A Christmas Memory,” famously adapted into a superb made-for-TV movie . . . and “The Bargain,” Capote’s melancholy, never-before-published 1950 story about a suburban housewife’s shifting fortunes. From the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are captured in this first-ever compendium. The Collected Stories of Truman Capote should restore its author to a place above mere celebrity, to the highest levels of American letters.

The early fiction of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, Truman Capote, as he takes his first bold steps into the canon of American literature Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and In Cold Blood. This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capote developing the unique voice and sensibility that would make him one of the twentieth century’s most original writers. Spare yet heartfelt, these stories summon our compassion and feeling at every turn. Capote was always drawn to outsiders—women, children, African Americans, the poor—because he felt like one himself from a very early age. Here we see Capote’s powers of empathy developing as he depicts his characters struggling at the margins of their known worlds. A boy experiences the violence of adulthood when he pursues an escaped convict into the woods. Petty jealousies lead to a life-altering event for a popular girl at Miss Burke’s Academy for Young Ladies. In a time of extraordinary loss, a woman fights to save the life of a child who has her lover’s eyes. In these stories we see early signs of Capote’s genius for creating unforgettable characters built of complexity and yearning. Young women experience the joys and pains of new love. Urbane sophisticates are worn down by cynicism. Children and adults alike seek understanding in a treacherous world. There are tales of crime and violence; of racism and injustice; of poverty and despair. And there are tales of generosity and tenderness; compassion and connection; wit and wonder. Above all there is the developing voice of a writer born in the Deep South who will use and eventually break from that tradition to become a literary figure like no other. With a foreword by the celebrated New Yorker critic Hilton Als, this volume of early stories is essential for understanding how a boy from Monroeville, Alabama, became a legend in American literature. Praise for The Early Stories of Truman Capote “Succeeds at conveying the writer’s youthful rawness . . . These stories capture a moment when Capote was hungry to capture the rural South, the big city, and the subtle emotions that so many around him were determined to keep unspoken.”—USA Today “A window on the young writer’s emerging voice and creativity . . . Capote’s ability to conjure a time, place and mood with just a few sentences is remarkable.”—Associated Press

Although Truman Capote''s last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly." —The New York Times Book Review Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.

Perhaps no twentieth-century writer was so observant and graceful a chronicler of his times as Truman Capote. Portraits and Observations is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. Included are such masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as “The Muses Are Heard” and the short nonfiction novel “Handcarved Coffins,” as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to the author’s last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered “Remembering Willa Cather,” Portraits and Observations puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote’s brilliance. Certainly Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, “a stylist of the first quality.” But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance. Praise for Portraits and Observations NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD “A must-have treasure for Capote fans . . . These are delicious, dramatic, and tender nonfiction portraits and tales.” –NPR’s Morning Edition “A wonderful volume . . . Nearly every page can be read with real pleasure. . . . No matter what his subject, [Capote’s] canny, careful art gives it warm and breathing life” –The Washington Post Book World “Every piece is a treasure. . . . Pages and pages of remarkably evocative, careful and well-observed prose [delineate,] in a measured and elegant manner, one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the twentieth century.” –Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Witness the coming together of Truman Capote’s voice, the electric-into-neon blaze that is surely one of the premier styles of postwar American literature.”—The Washington Post Book World “A great breezy read . . . with Capote’s trademark wit, but also with genuine youthful awe at the exhilaration of late-forties New York.”—New York A lost treasure only recently found, Truman Capote’s Summer Crossing is a precocious, confident first novel from one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Set in New York just after World War II, the story follows a young carefree socialite, Grady McNeil, whose parents leave her alone in their Fifth Avenue penthouse for the summer. Left to her own devices, Grady turns up the heat on the secret affair she’s been having with a Brooklyn-born Jewish war veteran who works as a parking lot attendant. As the season passes, the romance turns more serious and morally ambiguous, and Grady must eventually make a series of decisions that will forever affect her life and the lives of everyone around her.

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are In Cold Blood, Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capote’s extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy. Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany’s shares not only the author’s philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany’s; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid “that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.” Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father—who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.

A holiday classic from "one of the greatest writers and most fascinating society figures in American history" (Vanity Fair)! First published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection from Truman Capote (In Cold Blood; Breakfast at Tiffany''s) about his rural Alabama boyhood is a perfect gift for Capote''s fans young and old. Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk: "It''s fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship and the memories the two friends share of beloved holiday rituals.

One unforgettable Christmas, young Truman Capote is sent from his childhood home and his beloved cousin Miss Sook to New Orleans, to a father he''s never met. Far from the warmth and familiarity of small town dreams and family traditions, Truman learns the painful truths about his father, about Santa Claus, and about love lost and found.

The tranquil life he led in the quiet enclave of Brooklyn Heights stood in sharp contrast to the glittering scene he adored on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, but for a few years in the 1950''s and ''60''s, Truman Capote happily made his home in a yellow brick house on Willow Street. By turns wistful and farcical, A House on the Heights vividly evokes a neighborhood Capote described as among Brooklyn''s "splendid contradictions," a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, of mysterious warehouses and cartoonish street thugs, of antiques and dowagers, a broad yard overhung with wisteria, and the famous Esplanade with its incomparable view—all rendered in Capote''s deft and stylish prose.

This selection of Capote''s works is divided into six parts: short stories, novellas, travel sketches, reportage, portraits, and essays.

A boy recalls his life with an elderly relative in rural Alabama in the 1930s and the lesson she taught him one Thanksgiving Day about dealing with a bully from school. Autobiographical.

Truman Capotes neu editierte Werke in der achtbändigen Zürcher Ausgabe im Schmuckschuber

"Collection of essays, profiles, travel pieces and observations ..."--book jacket.

Bobby, a West Virginia boy, leaves the beauty of his mountain home and the security of his beloved grandparents to move with his parents to the city, where he can get a good education and where his father can earn a better living.

In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders them with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. “An incomparable stylist and entertainer . . . clean and cool . . . [with a] superb, near-perfect pitch with dialogue.” —The New York Times Book Review Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, remains one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of his time.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library''s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote--also available are "Breakfast at Tiffany''s "and" Other Voices, Other Rooms "(in one volume), " Portraits and Observations, "and "The Complete Stories" Truman Capote''s masterpiece, "In Cold Blood, "created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in "The New Yorker" in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the "new journalism." Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. "I thought he was a very nice gentleman," he says of Herb Clutter. "Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers'' flight, Capote''s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas. Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and he traveled to Kansas to write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and they interviewed residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. Killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested six weeks after the murders and later executed by the state of Kansas. Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. Herbert "Herb" Clutter was a prosperous farmer in western Kansas. He employed as many as 18 farmhands, who admired and respected him for his fair treatment and good wages. His two elder daughters, Eveanna and Beverly, had moved out and started their adult lives; his two younger children, daughter Nancy, 16, and son Kenyon, 15, were in high school. Clutter''s wife Bonnie had reportedly been incapacitated by clinical depression and physical ailments since the births of her children, although this was later disputed by her brother and other family members, who maintained that Bonnie''s depression was not as debilitating as portrayed in the book. Two ex-convicts recently paroled from the Kansas State Penitentiary, Richard Eugene "Dick" Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, robbed and murdered Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon in the early morning hours of November 15, 1959. A former cellmate of Hickock''s, Floyd Wells, had worked for Herb Clutter and told Hickock that Clutter kept large amounts of cash in a safe. Hickock soon hatched the idea to steal the safe and start a new life in Mexico. According to Capote, Hickock described his plan as "a cinch, the perfect score." Hickock later contacted Smith, another former cellmate, about committing the robbery with him.In fact, Herb Clutter had no safe and transacted essentially all of his business by check. After driving more than 400 miles across the state of Kansas on the evening of November 14, Hickock and Smith arrived in Holcomb, located the Clutter home, and entered through an unlocked door while the family slept. Upon rousing the Clutters and discovering there was no safe, they bound and gagged the family, and continued to search for money, but found little of value in the house.