Where to Start Reading Truman Capote

The book that gave us one of the best known page-to-screen adaptations and a starlet adored the world over. The movie created a 60s style icon from a character grounded in this novella about World War II New York. This is a quick and satisfying read.

If you can only read one true crime in your life, make it this one. With an intricately woven plot, a deft touch for detail, and enthralling characters, Truman Capote’s masterclass of narrative nonfiction has all the story components of a page-turning thriller. Only it’s all true!

Capote worked on this novel on and off for a decade, set in New York over the steamy summer of 1945. This coming-of-age story of broken hearts and class divides, written in a voice that’s all Capote, was posthumously published in 2005.

This is a story about a story — and the very real people behind it. Before there were The Real Housewives, there were Capote’s Swans. Bestselling biographer Lawrence Leamer takes us behind the scenes of Capote’s success, his epic bout of writer’s block, and the decision that ruined his career.

Wondering what Truman wrote that made his Swans abandon him? It’s all here.

More than once we’ve wanted to drop everything and move into a tree house. This is a story about the families we choose, the ones we leave behind, and the universal (and very human) need for community.

“…in the twentieth century only two writers of distinguished fiction managed to become household names — Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote … Capote left behind not only a riveting crime narrative but also a quantity of early fiction (three brief novels and a handful of short stories) that await the close attention and measured admiration he long since earned.” — Reynolds Price, from the introduction.

A delightful gift edition of Capote’s magazine work including celebrity profiles and travel essays, captured in his impeccable style. From the American Southwest to Europe, the hustle of the 1950s to the dazzle of the 1980s, the beginning of Capote’s career to the very end, this is as much a portrait of America as it is of the writer himself.

“Truman Capote wrote to his friends as he spoke to them, without constraints, inhibitions or polite verbal embroidery.” — Gerald Clarke, from the introduction. We never got an autobiography from Truman Capote, but this is the next best thing, the most intimate look at Capote’s life to date.