(1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.
From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples were Local Color (1950) and The Muses Are Heard (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).
Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death.
He worked for many years on Answered Prayers, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelo
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
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Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Stephen Jay Gould
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Vartan Gregorian
•
Charles Johnson
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Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
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William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
1996 Modern Library Edition
Biographical note copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
“A Christmas Memory” copyright © 1956 by Truman Capote
Copyright renewed 1984 by Truman Capote
“One Christmas” copyright © 1982, 1983 by Truman Capote
“The Thanksgiving Visitor” copyright © 1967 by Truman Capote
Copyright renewed 1995 by Alan U. Schwartz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of “A Christmas Memory” were originally published in Mademoiselle and the entire story appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, published by Random House, Inc., in 1958. Portions of “One Christmas” were originally published in Ladies’ Home Journal and the entire story was published by Random House, Inc., in 1983.
“The Thanksgiving Visitor” was originally published in McCall’s and in book form by Random House, Inc., in 1968.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82881-1
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
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