Other Voices, Other Rooms

by Truman Capote

Truman Capote was born on this day in 1924, one hundred years ago. He is perhaps best remembered for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and his true-crime book In Cold Blood (1965), but I would recommend trying his first published novel, the semi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).

Truman Capote (1924-1984)

Truman Streckfus Persons’s parents divorced when he was six and he was raised by his mother’s relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He became childhood friends with Harper Lee, who later used him as the model for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). In 1932, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her new Cuban husband, Joseph Garcia Capote, who adopted him and renamed him Truman Garcia Capote. After a brief job in the art department of the New Yorker, from which he was fired for upsetting Robert Frost, Capote devoted the rest of his life to writing.

He became one of America’s most notorious authors, producing stories, novels, screenplays and works of non-fiction. Norman Mailer called him ‘the most perfect writer of my generation’. He cultivated a lifelong rivalry with Gore Vidal and became a familiar face on television talk shows, but his last years were dominated by drugs, alcohol and cosmetic procedures. When Capote died, Vidal described it as ‘a wise career move’.

Penguin Modern Classics | 192 pages | introduction by John Berendt

Capote’s first published novel is set in a decaying Alabama mansion. Thirteen-year-old Joel Knox travels to live with a father he has never met, but instead meets his prim stepmother, her transvestite cousin Randolph and the local tomboy, Idabel, modelled on Capote’s childhood friend Harper Lee. Gradually Joel comes to acknowledge his own identity amidst the secrets of this Southern Gothic setting.

‘Joel accepts his destiny, which is to be homosexual,’ writes Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke, ‘to always hear other voices and live in other rooms. Yet acceptance is not a surrender; it is a liberation.’

First edition (1948), front

The back of the dust jacket of the 1948 first edition carried a provocative, erotically posed photograph of Capote taken by Harold Halma, which helped to fuel the book’s reputation:

First edition (1948), back

A young Andy Warhol was mesmerized by this image. In 1952, Warhol’s first New York one-man show was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote.

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