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This chapter describes Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which was an enormous critical and financial success in the mid-1960s. After the release of In Cold Blood Capote collected his materials and started writing Answered Prayers. He described writing his last novel as a tough job on several levels and unique in his artistic life. It is a perfect summary of all those aspects of Capote's psychological life, outlining his attachment insecurity and conflicts surrounding his mother. It was a complex mess of claims, needs, hopes, and intentions.

This chapter focuses on Truman Capote's distrust of psychoanalysis, in part because of his history of confrontation with his mother over matters of sexuality, her willingness to turn to doctors when seeking solutions for his “girliness”. She believed that talk therapy might make him a man. Capote dealt with his problems through his writing, where he understood and defined himself. His very first published book, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a slightly scandalous but not entirely successful homosexual fantasy in which Capote replayed attachment anxieties.

This chapter describes events in Truman Capote's childhood that lead to his inspiration for writing his last novel, Answered Prayers. Capote's mother Lillie Mae was a beautiful, narcissist and social-climber while his father, Arch Persons, was a hopeless con man. Arch and Lillie were married on August 23, 1923, but after seven years of marriage, they filed for divorce in August, 1931. Capote's father was an important figure in his life, influencing his fictional works in a number of ways, especially early works like Other Voices, Other Rooms.

This chapter considers the motivations behind Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood, his non-fiction novel about the murder of the Clutters, a farm family in Kansas. Capote got the idea for the book after coming across a one-column item about the murders in The New York Times in 1959, a year after the release of Breakfast at Tiffany 's. Capote's initial intention was to write a relatively modest piece, focusing only on the echoes of the murders within the tiny Holcomb community. But writing In Cold Blood represented a different kind of challenge.

Among all the creative arts, writing is the one that directors often find difficult to convey on screen. Films on the lives of real writers tend to downplay the actual act of writing and focus instead on their private lives, either drawing parallels between what they write about and their lives, or how events serve as inspiration for their emotional inner life and its transfer to the written page. This chapter examines the lives of three writers, and four interpretations of their lives: Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001), Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003), and two versions of Truman Capote in Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006).

This chapter describes how Truman Capote was born with a tendency towards anxiety, presenting different neurochemical, neurotransmitter-based models of anxiety disorder or depression. He was also born with alcoholism, with both him and his mother being heavy drinkers. Capote also feared closeness, intimacy, and the vulnerability caused by seeking out love, because these things, from his earliest childhood memories, ended in rejection or abandonment. He expected to be hurt and unconsciously anticipated it. More often than not, his expectations were met; people did reject and abandon him.

The fifth chapter examines the roles of interviewer and interviewee, exploring debates around objectivity and personality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period in which these roles came under pressure, partly as a reaction against the interrogative interviewing that dominated in previous decades. Drawing on the famed series of interviews in The Paris Review and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and colleagues, the chapter illustrates how the interview emerged as a site where authors could discuss those topics such as methodology, market orientation, and intention that had been largely dismissed by New Criticism. These writers and publications, while beholden to a canonical modernist tradition, reject this older conception of the interview. In so doing, they enabled the interview to be conceived by authors, including ageing modernists, as an aesthetically and critically engaged activity in an age of celebrity authorship.

This chapter describes Truman Capote's early childhood experiences. One in particular is the emotional devastation he felt when he was locked in the hotel room by his mother at age two. Another occurred at age three when he was left alone in a zoo by his nanny who fled after two lions were suspected to escape their cages. Capote's biographer, Gerald Clarke, points out that the zoo memory and the memory of the hotel room seemed like two versions of the same basic experience. For Capote, he experienced in both events the loss of emotional control, the sense that the world was dangerous, and that adults who should be responsive in the face of danger simply could not be depended for comfort.

This chapter looks at the American success story of the self-made man and how it was reinterpreted in the context of 20^th Century Southern masculinity. Focusing on novels by Wolfe, Ellison, Styron, Capote, and Warren, the chapter builds on earlier scholarship that identifies a shift from idealized images of planter and slave to new models of masculinity for blacks and whites. The central claim is that new narrative patterns were embraced that set male characters on journeys outside the South to encounter that world and find success. A mania of sorts evolved around this narrative as portrayed by Wolfe who represented wandering as opportunity for introspection, movement as a means to remake one’s self, and liminal space as a site of creativity for the neophyte writer but also a distinctly masculine zone. The chapter ends with reflections on how this journey is altered when males encounter racial or sexual prejudice.

This chapter discusses generalising aspects of specific values which link to an appeal of a value and appreciation of beauty in the two-stage process of evaluation. A reference to Truman Capote’s novel ‘In Cold Blood’ is given. The perception of value and understanding is given analysis with views on changes and interpretation as an act of response. It also considers the distinction between knowledge and taste and the gradual changes of a norm when two processes are available, thus blurring the line of diagnosis. Complex reactions on a value are one of the reasons why this book provides a thorough explanation on the need to understand the contingency at the heart of a value.

During his final years, Latouche faced some discrimination and censure as a result of his inclusion in a 1950 handbook entitled Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. For all his malaise during these years, he continued to kick up his heels with friends and maintain his reputation as one of the city’s brightest wits and raconteurs. His eclectic assortment of friends durisng this period included composer Ned Rorem; writers Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Jack Kerouac; ghost hunter Hans Holzer; and poet Frank O’Hara. He also became romantically involved with the heiress Alice Bouverie (of the Astor dynasty) as well as with painter Harry Martin and poet Kenward Elmslie, with whom he purchased a country home in Vermont.

During the early and middle part of the 1960s Betty Comden and Adolph Green were no longer splitting their time between working on shows for Broadway and movies in Hollywood, and as a result they were able to dedicate more time to their personal lives. And while they might have been spending time with the elite of New York’s society, they were not unaware of the issues facing the country. This informed a pair of stand-alone songs they penned with Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein as well as their next musical, Hallelujah, Baby! Featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, the show chronicled the African-American experience during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Uggams was the star of what was ultimately an unconventional tuner that had music by Jule Styne and went on to win a Tony Award as best musical