The Plaza Hotel Party

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.