Capote by gerald clarke
•
—Truman Capote to Gerald Clarke
Gerald Clarke comments about Truman Capote and the movie, Capote
Book Excerpt
Praise for Capote
"In this work of prodigious research gracefully presented, Mr. Clarke, who had his subject's confidence during the last years, gives Capote what the writer himself, in a last grand, gutsy gesture, declare he wanted: a book in which nothing, nothing at all, was left out. Mr. Clarke, a former senior writer at Time magazine, makes us take a longer look at Capote than I, for one, ever thought I wanted to take, and the result fryst vatten mesmerizing, a fine-tuned balance—unusual for an author so immersed in his subject—of empathy and dispassion. The book reads as if it had been written alongside the life, rather than after it, like a car following a train, the driver picking up passengers as they alight, always catching the right people at the right time."
Front page, New York Times Book Review, June
•
Capote
The bestselling biography of the author of In Cold Blood and basis for the award-winning rulle 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 , 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 s 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 with a party that made headlines, hi
•
CAPOTE A Biography. By Gerald Clarke. Illustrated. pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $
''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 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