Biography Essay

When he died just over a month short of his sixtieth birthday, Truman Capote left behind a substantial fortune, a legacy of literary success and controversy, and a sense of incompleteness, of promise unfulfilled. Having literally made his name a household word in the late 1960s with the massive success of In Cold Blood, with the "party of the decade," and with frequent TV talk-show appearances, Capote produced little in the final two decades of his life—at least little that had been released. He published only two significant volumes in the years between 1966 and his death. The Dogs Bark appeared in 1973 and Music for Chameleons in 1980, but the former chiefly reprinted earlier work, some of it dating back to the beginning of his career. Only Music for Chameleons gave indications of what Capote had been up to in the post-In Cold Blood years...