Truman Capote 1924-1984

Truman Capote was born in 1924 as Truman Streckfus Persons, Capote being the name of his stepfather.

Truman Capote was born and raised in New Orleans. He was brought up by aunts and cousins after his parents separated and attended school in Greenwich, Connecticut. At fourteen he started writing short stories, and some of them were published in the school paper Green Witch. He left school at fifteen and when he was eighteen he moved to New York City, where he spent several years working for The New Yorker magazine. Truman Capote wrote novels, short stories, plays, movie scripts and a variety of non-fiction works for which he won numerous awards. At the age of nineteen Capote won an O. Henry prize for his short story Miriam. Another O.Henry prize went to him in 1948 for the story Shut a Final Door. His first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948. It was elaborately furnished with the grotesque set against the background of the South and drew national attention. Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is a sensitively rendered account of a boy's growth. This was followed by other early works, including A Tree of Night (1949), and The Grass Harp (1951). They focus on dark, sinister aspects of human existence. His non-fiction book In Cold Blood (1966) delves into the underlying motives of a violent crime. Capote also wrote several humorous works, including The Muses are Heard (1956) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). The latter is the story of a New York cafe society playgirl, Holdiay Golightly, who is considered immoral by the society in which she lives. But the reader realizes that it is not the heroine but the society itself is abnormal and immoral.

Music for Chameleons (1980) is a collection of stories, journalistic pieces, and a "faction" report on the mass murderer of his story Handcarved Coffins. This is a history of a real criminal case written as a novel in the tone of a fictional and journalistic techniques he called " faction ". In the preface to the new collection Capote reaffirms his intention to use journalistic forms to create a work of art. The last piece in the book is a dialogue between the author and his alter ego, drawing upon Flaubert's La Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier. Capote sees his own development reflected in the story of the adored only son who turns into a hunter of insatiable bloodlust and inadvertently kills his parents. At the end of the story Julien, now a penitent, encounters a leper who asks him to kiss his lips. When Julien complies, the leper is transformed into God. Thus Julien becomes Saint Julien.

Along with William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and other writers he is considered part of the southern Gothic tradition. Strategies of this tradition include exaggeration, parody, irony and heightened reality. The Grass Harp has been called "a parable of freedom". Capote became skilled in what, as in In Cold Blood, he describes as a "nonfiction novel."

The Grass Harp. The story is told by Collin Fenwick, a boy of sixteen, who has been living with his two unmarried aunts Dolly and Venera Talbo. Their former coloured servant Catherine dislikes Venera who is the richest woman in the city and loves Dolly whom she calls Dolly-heart. Collin said; "Pulled and guided by the gravity of Venera's planet, we rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house."

In her youth Dolly had learned the secret of making herbal medicine, the formula of which was given to her by a Gypsy woman. Catherine and Collin help her. They spend the little money they get for their medicine together. Down the field of Indian grass where Dolly used to gather the herbs there is a tree. Dolly likes to sit up "a double-trunked China tree, really two trees, but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into another." For her "it was a ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream." She is a dreamer. She lives in this quietness of nature. But soon it is interrupted by Venera who decides to make money on Dolly's medical talent by obtaining a patent for Dolly's medicine. To get it Dolly had to open her secret - to give the formula of medicine. She is horrified by the idea that it will be used for business purposes and refuses to give the formula. She leaves the house and goes to live in the tree. Catherine, Collin, their two friends Riley Henderson and Judge Cool join her and they spend three days together discovering that they are real friends. Venera sends two parties of men to force Dolly to leave her place. But nothing helps. Finally a pouring rain makes them go home. Dolly falls ill that winter and dies. Collin can not stay in the house after that. "It was too thick with air that did not move." The readers come to understand that life without dreams is still and stale, like that air in the house that "did not move."

John Cheever (1912-1982)

John Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. Although he often used his family as material, his daughter Susan Cheever has reminded that "of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories."

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachussetts. His father owned a shoe factory and was relatively wealthy until he lost his business in the 1929 stock market crash and deserted his family. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal education ended when he was seventeen. After leaving home, Cheever studied at Thayer Academy, but was expelled for smoking. The experience was the nucleus of his first published story, Expelle' (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for New Republic. For a time Cheever lived with his brother in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York, where he was acquainted with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers' colony in Saratoga Springs.

A number of Cheever's early works were published in The New Republic, Collier's Story, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a lifelong association with the New Yorker. He married in 1941 Mary Winternitz, and published two years later his first book, The Way Some People Live, which depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. Originally the stories had appeared in magazines. During World War II Cheever had served four years as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps.

After the war Cheever worked as a teacher and wrote scripts for television. In 1951 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. Most of the stories in Cheever's second collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), were set in New York City. The title story bears some similarities with Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954), in which the theme was voyeurism; in Cheever's story a woman eavesdrops on her neighbors' private conversations through a magic radio. In the mid-1950s Cheever began writing novels. The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) was strongly autobiographical, based on his mother's and father's relationship, his family's genteel decline, and own life. The book won the National Book Award in 1958. "Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." (from The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957). In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl from 1920.

In 1964 Cheever spent six weeks in Russia as a part of cultural exchange program. Next year American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Howells Medal for The Wapshot Scandal (1964), in which he describes some of the characters familiar from his first novel. From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College - a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). In Boston Cheever became depressed and had drinking problems. He was a month at the Smithers Rehabilitation Center in New York City. These experiences found later place in his novel Falconer (1977), a story about college professor who makes a journey to personal rebirth during his year in Falconer Prison. In the story Ezekiel Farragut kills his brother, Eben, and becomes a heroin addict - or addicted to illusions. Farragut's discovery of religion and his escape from the prison, from the violence and despair, can be interpreted as a kind of redemption. At the end of the novel an ordinary bus stop become Farragut's passport to reality. " You are a professor and the education of the young - of all those who seek learning - is your vocation. We learn by experience, do we not, and as a professor, distinguished by the responsibilities of intellectual and moral leadership, you have chosen to commit the heinous crime of fratricide while under the influence of dangerous drugs. Aren't you ashamed?"-"I want to be sure that I get my methadone," Farragut said. (from Falconer)

Cheever's other major works include the experimental Bullet Park (1969), an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, in which Eliot Nailles, a chemist, meets Paul Hammer, who is not the ordinary citizen he seems to be. "We're the Hammers," The stranger said to the priest. Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands cocktail parties would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles." Hammer is the illegitimate son of a kleptomaniac, and he plans to awaken the suburban world - by burning Eliot's son Tony in a church. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award.

Cheever died in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. His widow, Mary, signed in 1987 a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, publishd in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became novelists.

Cheever contrasted often the ordinary suburban milieu with the chaotic or hidden emotional states of his characters. Several stories, such as "The Five-Fourty Eight," about the revenge of a humiliated woman, were set in the fictional suburban commuter town of Shady Hill, a fallen Paradise. Eventually Cheever's middle- or upper-middle-class characters come to face their own shortcomings. In three novels Cheever used two brothers to represent different values of modern life. One of his most famous stories, The Swimmer (1964), portrays a man, who refuses to acknowledge his failures. The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, swims his way home from one pool to another. The story inspired Frank Perry's and Sydney Pollack's film from 1968, starring Burt Lancaster in his trunks. At the end of the film the swimmer's stories about his success turn out to be a fantasy - his home is both locked and empty.

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