Like FX’s FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans and Already Read In Cold Blood? Here’s Some More of His Writing
Author Truman Capote’s eye for detail and drama and his characters’ dialogue written with such a specific patter that then-New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote her 2005 review of Capote’s posthumously published novel Summer Crossing in the tone of his most famous heroine, Breakfast at Tiffany’s society girl Holly Golightly. (“I always told Truman he was far too hung up on class and all that rubbish,” deadpans Kakutani in the review, something one can imagine Holly’s on-screen persona, Audrey Hepburn, saying breathlessly while adjusting her large black sunglasses).
In addition to Tiffany’s, Capote was famous for writing what was called “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. This feat of investigative reporting about four small-town homicides decades gave the audience a bloodthirsty thrill before the term “true crime” was synonymous with names like Sarah Koenig, Michelle McNamara, and Andrew Jarecki. The six years Capote spent immersed in the 1959 killings of four members of the Clutter family, and the subsequent trial and conviction of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, warranted the writer “$2-million in magazine, book, and film payments,” the Times reported in 1965.
He was infamous, however, for the events like the ones depicted in FX’s FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans. Set after the publication of In Cold Blood, the miniseries finds Capote (portrayed by Tom Hollander) more of a bloated and broke self-important gossip who sells the only thing he has left to sell: works of technical fiction that were really thinly veiled screeds about the New York society women who’d entrusted him with their friendship and secrets. (With his flair for the sartorial and a voice seemingly suffering from perpetual post-nasal drip, Capote—who died at age 59 in 1984—was a personality just begging to be imitated. Most notably, there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for portraying him in Capote, and Robert Morse, who won a Tony for portraying him in the one-man show Tru and a subsequent Emmy for starring in an American Playhouse presentation of that play).
FEUD is airing through March on FX and Hulu. But what other works by Capote besides In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s are worth reading? Here’s a list of a few.
Miriam: A Classic Story of Loneliness
First published in the June 1945 issue of Mademoiselle magazine (and later winning an O. Henry Award), one of Capote’s first published works follows a widow who insists she wants to be alone. She then gets increasingly freaked out by the young woman who keeps appearing at her door.
Lots of English literature class synopsis ink has been spilled on this story, as it relates to isolation, loneliness, grief, and our natural human fears surrounding aging and death. But Capote apparently snapped at a college student whom he felt didn’t understand his story. In 2018, the Times profiled a woman who’d discovered a letter Capote had written to her (now late) mother in 1945. It appeared to be in response to a critique her mother, then a college junior, had written to him. “I take it you do not understand Miriam’s relation to Mrs. Miller,” he wrote before explaining the story to her as if it were a fairy tale.
Miriam would later be included in Capote’s 1949 collection, A Tree of Night and Other Stories. The seven other pieces in that anthology share similar themes. These include Children on Their Birthdays, which was adapted into a 2002 film directed by Mark Medoff and starring a young Jesse Plemons.
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