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Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies
Truman Capote once remarked, “My primary thing is that I’m a prose writer. I don’t think film is the greatest living thing”; nonetheless, his legacy is in many ways defined by his complex relationship with cinema, Hollywood, and celebrity itself. In Truman A Literary Life at the Movies , Tison Pugh explores the author and his literature through a cinematic lens, skillfully weaving the most relevant elements of Capote’s biography― including his highly flamboyant public persona and his friendships and feuds with notable stars―with insightful critical analysis of the films, screenplays, and adaptations of his works that composed his fraught relationship with the Hollywood machine.
Capote’s masterful short stories and novels ensure his status as an iconic author of the twentieth century, and his screenplays, including Beat the Devil , Indiscretion of an American Wife , and The Innocents , allowed him to collaborate with such Hollywood heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, and David O. Selznick. Throughout his professional life he circulated freely in a celebrity milieu populated by such notables as Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Cinematic adaptations of his literature, most notably Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood , play with or otherwise alter Capote’s queer literary themes, often bleaching his daring treatment of homosexuality in favor of heterosexual romance.
Truman A Literary Life at the Movies reveals Capote’s literary works to be not merely coincident to film but integral to their mutual creation, paying keen attention to the ways in which Capote’s identity as a gay southerner influenced his and others’ perceptions of his literature and its adaptations. Pugh’s research illuminates Capote’s personal and professional successes and disappointments in the film industry, helping to create a more nuanced portrait of the author and bringing fresh details to light.
Capote’s masterful short stories and novels ensure his status as an iconic author of the twentieth century, and his screenplays, including Beat the Devil , Indiscretion of an American Wife , and The Innocents , allowed him to collaborate with such Hollywood heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, and David O. Selznick. Throughout his professional life he circulated freely in a celebrity milieu populated by such notables as Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Cinematic adaptations of his literature, most notably Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood , play with or otherwise alter Capote’s queer literary themes, often bleaching his daring treatment of homosexuality in favor of heterosexual romance.
Truman A Literary Life at the Movies reveals Capote’s literary works to be not merely coincident to film but integral to their mutual creation, paying keen attention to the ways in which Capote’s identity as a gay southerner influenced his and others’ perceptions of his literature and its adaptations. Pugh’s research illuminates Capote’s personal and professional successes and disappointments in the film industry, helping to create a more nuanced portrait of the author and bringing fresh details to light.
497 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
About the author
Inglis Fletcher
33 books27 followersInglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture.
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 20, 2015
Pugh looks at how film influenced Capote's work and how is work was transformed into films. It is a fascinating study not only of Capote's work but also the film adaptations of his works.
"As his partner Jack Dunphy explained, 'Truman had a way of telling half-truths and whole lies,' and Tennessee Williams while searching for a 'polite way of saying he does fabricate,' insightfully labeled Capote, not a liar, but a 'mythologist." 18
"With more insouciant flags, Capote also professed to David Frost (in a witticism often attributed to Dorothy Parker), "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true." 41
"His trenchant musings on the shifting cultural meaning of time-"The Swiss manufacture it. The Italians squander it. The French hoard it. The Americans worship it. But time is a crook.."64
"A flower is blooming inside you, and soon, when all the tight petals unfold, when the bloom of youth burns brightest, you will turn back and look, as other have, at the opening of another door." 181. From Other Voices, Other Doors
"As his partner Jack Dunphy explained, 'Truman had a way of telling half-truths and whole lies,' and Tennessee Williams while searching for a 'polite way of saying he does fabricate,' insightfully labeled Capote, not a liar, but a 'mythologist." 18
"With more insouciant flags, Capote also professed to David Frost (in a witticism often attributed to Dorothy Parker), "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true." 41
"His trenchant musings on the shifting cultural meaning of time-"The Swiss manufacture it. The Italians squander it. The French hoard it. The Americans worship it. But time is a crook.."64
"A flower is blooming inside you, and soon, when all the tight petals unfold, when the bloom of youth burns brightest, you will turn back and look, as other have, at the opening of another door." 181. From Other Voices, Other Doors
Displaying 1 of 1 review