Research paper on Truman Capote

Truman Capote’s innovative and controversial techniques earned him celebrity status and fame as a professional author. He was called a pioneer of his times, even though there are supporters and critics of his unique style. His life and childhood played a major role in the development of his style and prose. Truman Capote, a pioneer in his works, mixes dark reality with a touch of his own intuition and insight in his sometimes autobiographical and other times reality based stories.

Capote’s childhood was by no means easy. He grew up in the Deep South of Alabama. His father left him, and he lived with his mother, yet also lived in a foster home for a time. Capote was extremely bright, yet did not apply himself much in school, and consequently received very poor grades. Capote always knew that he was going to be a writer, so he ended his schooling at age seventeen and obtained a job at the New Yorker. He was little more than an errand boy, yet he attracted attention with his styles and manners (Dictionary 82). Capote had many cultural experiences that were also evident in his works, for example racism. He faced racism in the heart of the South, where rac

There was usually always one specific type of character that he would write about in his daylight or “lighter” side of his works. This type of character was the dreamer. “There is an omnipresence of dreams in Capote’s fiction. Dreams in the earlier stories do not only constitute a private and self-sufficient world, but the creative element of the unconscious, and permit the release of imagination.” (Hassan 232). His characters possessed wild, elegant, extravagant dreams that were far from attainable. These characters may not be unlike Capote himself, who had amazing dreams of becoming something great when he was a child. These characters wanted society to be a place that was too good to be true, to fit their every want and need. We (the readers) come to think that Capote would actually like to give them their dreams.

ism was most prominent at the time. Capote’s early childhood also had a very profound affect on his works, especially his early works. His early works were dark and eerie, and often had many psychotic themes. He would delve into the realm of the supernatural and unknown, and many critics find these early works disturbing.

Capote would put his characters through journeys which dealt with finding their sexuality and what type of person they really were. He usually held these for his male characters, even though some of his female characters such as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This recurring theme of sexuality was very controversial. His haunted childhood and search for a father also played heavy roles in his themes, which I described earlier.

Capote’s most unique and recognized talent was his extraordinary ability to intertwine fact with fiction, fantasy with reality. He engages reality without being realistic, and mingles fact and fiction in a complicated and sometimes shocking way (Dictionary 83, 86). “Capote manages to liberate his images from the events which created them”, thus adding his own intuition (Schorer 84). Capote can use facts and real events and in effect turn them into a comic novel. “He shifts from fact into fantasy, from the real into the surreal, from the daily into the dream, from the natural into the supernatural” (Levine 135). His fiction reads life non-fiction, and his non-fiction read like fiction. Capote is a pioneer with this type of style, very few writers before him had ventured into this formally forbidden land. His pioneered work, In Cold Blood, is described as being “A new literary form that trumpeted the advance publicists”, that many will come to praise and denounce (French 929). He captivated readers and critics with his new genre, the “nonfiction novel”. His nonfiction novel, of course, is In Cold Blood. This is a dark and eerie book about the ruthless murders of four family members in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote does years of research on the case and even psychoanalyzes the killers, and digs deep into their own lives. This is where Capote ventures fiction. He puts him

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