Capote biography gerald clarke

The bestselling biography of the author of In Cold Blood and basis for the award-winning film Capote, Gerald Clarke provides insight into the life of.
Gerald Clarke is the author of Capote,the acclaimed biography of Truman Capote.
This absorbing, definitive biography follows Truman Capote from his eccentric childhood in Alabama to the heights of New York society.

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CAPOTE A Biography. By Gerald Clarke. Illustrated. 632 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $22.95.

''HOLLY GOLIGHTLY, c'est moi,''

Truman Capote might well have said, echoing the words of Flaubert. A number of dashing women about town claimed to be the model for the heroine of ''Breakfast at Tiffany's,'' but to a marked degree she took her shape and essence and angst and hummingbird existence from the author himself. Flaubert, Capote's literary idol, only entered the mind of Emma Bovary, whereas Capote was his provincial waif. In this 1958 novel, the future avatar of ''new journalism'' was already recording the arc of his life. He had come to the big city from Monroeville, Ala.; he charmed and wrote his way into the literary limelight; he seduced the rich and famous. He would waver at the top where drugs, alcohol and the ''mean reds'' - the free-floating anxiety that ambushed the deeply insecure - would get the best of him, and he would spiral down in a sordid exit that lacked t

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Capote

The bestselling biography of the author of In Cold Blood and basis for the award-winning film Capote, Gerald Clarke provides insight into the life of Truman Capote like no one before.

An American original, Truman Capote was one of the best writers of his generation, a superb and almost matchless stylist. His short stories made him a literary celebrity while still in his teens, and for the next thirty years he was a comet of genius, fame, and finally self-destruction. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948, was followed ten years later by Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced to the world one of American literature’s most endearing heroines, the irrepressible Holly Golightly. In the 1960s came the phenomenal success of In Cold Blood, a true-crime story whose novelistic techniques have influenced nonfiction writers ever since.

A much-sought-after dinner guest among the rich and famous, Capote reciprocated in 1966 with a party that made headlines, his black-and-white ball at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. The trauma of researching and writin

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Theo Westenberger
courtesy Architectural Digest

About Gerald Clarke

Born in California, Gerald Clarke spent most of his childhood in Los Angeles, his teens in Ohio. He graduated from Yale, where he majored in English and American literature, then spent a postgraduate year traveling around Europe. "One of the best and most interesting years of my life," he calls that period. "In those days the dollar was strong, and you did not have to be rich to travel overseas. And Europe was the best postgraduate school in the world." Returning home, his sights set on becoming a lawyer, he began studies at Harvard Law School. "I soon discovered I didn't have either the desire or the temperament to be a lawyer," he says, "and I left at the beginning of my second year. But if I learned only one thing at Harvard, my time was not wasted. And what was that? I learned never to assume, never to jump to conclusions, always to examine the evidence. Just because two people pass each other on the street—to give one homely example—doesn't mean they see each other. One may be looking up or have his eye