# The Plaza Hotel Party *A Biography of Truman Capote* — Legendary Biographies No. 221 - **Subject:** Truman Streckfus Persons (Truman Capote) - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 204 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-148-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-618-0) - **Content notes:** addiction; homophobia Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/221-the-plaza-hotel-party.html ## About this book August 25, 1984, the Bel Air home of Joanne Carson, the former wife of Johnny Carson. Truman Streckfus Persons Capote, fifty-nine, the writer who had published Other Voices, Other Rooms at twenty-three, Breakfast at Tiffany's at thirty-four, and In Cold Blood at forty-two, dies of liver failure complicated by polysubstance abuse. He has been estranged from most of his old friends since the 1975 Esquire publication of La Côte Basque, 1965, the chapter of his unfinished Answered Prayers that betrayed the confidences of every swan he had cultivated. Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in Monroeville, Alabama, where Truman was born in 1924 to a teenage Lillie Mae Faulk and an itinerant shipping clerk named Archulus Persons, and where his next-door neighbour Harper Lee would become his lifelong friend — and follows the arc through the long Monroeville-to-New-York childhood after his mother's remarriage to the Cuban-Jewish accountant Joseph Capote in 1933, the long Greenwich Village apprenticeship at The New Yorker, the Other Voices, Other Rooms of 1948 and the long Sicily-and-Paris years, the Breakfast at Tiffany's of 1958, the In Cold Blood of 1966 and the long Smith-and-Hickock Garden City research years, the November 28, 1966 Black and White Ball at the Plaza, the long 1970s decline of La Côte Basque, 1965 and the social ostracism, and the August 1984 death. What emerges is a portrait of the Monroeville-born twentieth-century American writer whose work invented the non-fiction novel — and whose long decline after the Esquire publication the New York social world he had built his life on enforced. ## Contents 1. Touro Infirmary 2. A Christmas Memory 3. Harper Lee Next Door 4. Park Avenue, 1933–1939 5. The New Yorker Copy Boy 6. Jack Dunphy 7. The Mother 8. Holly Golightly 9. Holcomb, Kansas, November 1959 10. Six Years 11. The Black and White Ball 12. The Swans 13. La Côte Basque, 1965 14. Studio 54, John O'Shea, the Cocaine Years 15. Bel Air, August 25, 1984 16. Dunphy, the Ashes, the Long Posthumous 17. The Films, the Biographies, the Long Afterlife 18. The Legend 19. Feud ## Questions **Who is The Plaza Hotel Party about?** Truman Streckfus Persons (Truman Capote). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Plaza Hotel Party — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,437 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 62,500 words, 19 chapters, 204 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: addiction; homophobia. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.