When he was eleven he began writing three hours a day and when he was nineteen he won an O. Henry Award for his short story "Shut a Final Door." His first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is the autobiographical story of a thirteen year-old in rural Alabama coping with his mother's death and his budding homosexuality. Typical of the rest of his career, the book equally impressed and scandalized its readers, not least for Capote's calculated, overtly sexual author photo. It spent nine weeks on the NYT bestseller list and brought him the fame he craved. Ten years later, after several books, a play, a screenplay, and a Broadway musical, Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffanys, a smash success. The following year, 1959, he saw a brief article about a family murdered on a farm in Kansas and embarked on what would become a years-long odyssey into the lives of everyone involved, including the killers. The New Yorker serialized In Cold Blood in 1965 and it became an international bestseller when it appeared as a book in 1966. Capote's genius legitimized the true crime genre and invented the "nonfiction novel." Later that year he hosted the Black and White Ball, what many consider to be the party of the century. Adding to residences on Park Avenue, Long Island, and Switzerland, he bought a house in Palm Springs, downgraded his relationship with Jack Dunphy, and sank into heavy abuse of alcohol and drugs for the next eighteen years. Claiming to be writing an American version of Proust's epic, Capote never finished more than four chapters of his endlessly delayed Answered Prayers. When they finally appeared in Esquire as short stories in 1975-6, his betrayal and mockery of the society wives he had swanned among for so many years cost him most of his friendships. His alcoholism and drug addictions worsened, as did his judgment: He often appeared on talk shows drunk, erratic, and boring. In 1980 he published Music for Chameleons to surprising acclaim but the renewal was short-lived. He talked big, hyping the nonexistent Answered Prayers and a revival of the Black and White Ball in Los Angeles, but nothing happened. He died in 1984 at fifty-nine. His royalties supported Dunphy until his death, then established a literary prize in honor of a former boyfriend, Newton Arvin, the brilliant National Book Award winning biographer and professor whose life was destroyed when he was fired from Smith College for being gay.
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