A Christmas Memory (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Truman Capote drew on his own youthful experience in rural Alabama to write “A Christmas Memory.” This story, which he called his personal favorite, is an idealized recollection of one of the few relatively secure periods of his unstable early childhood.

Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Although his parents did not formally divorce until he was seven years old, they never created a stable home for young Truman, and some of his earliest memories are of accompanying his mother, Lillie Mae, on job-hunting excursions to St. Louis, Missouri, and Louisville, Kentucky. At other times he was shuttled between the homes of various relatives in Alabama. One of these households of his mother’s relatives provided the settings for much of his early fiction, including “A Christmas Memory.”

In 1930, Capote was sent to live in Monroeville, Alabama, while his mother went to New York City to seek work. His new “family” consisted of the three middle-aged Faulk sisters and their older brother. One of the sisters, Sook, is the model for Buddy’s friend in “A Christmas Memory.” While in Monroeville, Truman became friends with Harper Lee, a young girl who lived next door and later gained recognition for writing the critically acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee allegedly based the character of Dill, a wildly imaginative young boy, on Capote. The two writers remained lifelong friends, and she later traveled to Kansas to help research his most famous work, In Cold Blood, the true story of the murder of a wealthy farm family. His mother remarried in 1932, and later that year he joined her and his new stepfather, Joseph Capote, in New York; in 1934 Truman became Truman Garcia Capote when Joseph formally adopted him.

In New York, Lillie Mae (who now called herself Nina) became alarmed by her son’s effeminate tendencies and sent him to St. John’s Military Academy. The other cadets made his life miserable by mocking his Southern accent and ridiculing his mannerisms. Eventually his mother withdrew him from St. John’s, and he returned to New York, where he developed his flair for storytelling and became quite popular as a raconteur — a teller of stories — at parties. Around 1943 he landed a job as a copyboy at the prestigious magazine The New Yorker, where he saw firsthand the ins and outs of the New York publishing world. His first story, “Miriam,” was published in Mademoiselle in June, 1945, and at the tender age of 21, Capote became the darling of the New York literary establishment.

Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared in 1948 and another novel, The Grass Harp, in 1951. In 1958 he wrote the short novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn, and he also wrote two screenplays. But it is In Cold Blood, in which he claimed to have invented a new genre, the nonfiction novel, which ensured his reputation and made him a social celebrity. Toward the end of his life, problems with alcohol and drugs sapped his creativity, and he never completed his final project, Answered Prayers, which was published posthumously in 1987. In his later years, Capote was known more as a social gadfly, one who hosted celebrated parties, like the infamous Black and White Ball held at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966. During the 1970s, he could frequently be found at the notorious Manhattan discotheque Studio 54. Capote died in Los Angeles, California, on August 25, 1984.