Truman Capote

Truman Capote by George H. Rothacker - acrylic on canvas -  24" x 24" - Original painting $2400, prints @$90 each plus tax and shipping (Prints are an edition of 50, signed, titled and numbered with an image area of 13"x 13")
Truman Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter and playwright whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized as literary classics. These include the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), which was made into an Academy Award winning movie (Best Song and Best Score) starring Audrey Hepburn, and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), also made into movie earning four Academy Award nominations.

I came across a collection of Capote's shorter works in the late 1970s, and was amazed by their eloquence, perceptiveness and hmanity. His first novel, Other Voices Other Rooms, published in 1948, focuses on 13-year-old Joel Knox who is sent from New Orleans to live with his father, who abandoned him at the time of his birth, after losing is mother to an early death. The semi-autobiographical book launched Capote's career by making and staying on the New York Times best seller list for nine weeks.

My favorite story of Capote's is A Christmas Memory (1956) about a young boy, "Buddy" and his best friend, an older cousin who is eccentric and childlike as they celebrate Christmas together making whiskey filled fruitcakes and chopping down a Christmas tree to celebrate the holiday together. The story is moving, beautiful and poignant, and year after year I would read it to the family during the Christmas season, never finishing without sobbing through to the end.

Capote's flaunted homosexuality, drug use, petty jealousies, bitternesses and undisciplined lifestyle thwarted his success in his later years. Many of his early works are lauded among the greatest of 20th Century writers, while many later works remained unfinished at his death.

He said in his later years that he felt like a "spiritual orphan." "You see, I was so different from everyone, so much more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive. I was having fifty perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought."

Capote died of liver complications in 1984 at the age of 59.


Truman Capote





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