Truman Capote's Influence On To Kill A Mockingbird

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Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans on September 30, 1924 to Lillie Mae Faulk and Joseph “Arch” Streckfus Persons. Lillie Mae and Arch never had a happy marriage, as he had promised her a fulfilling marriage, only for her to find him to be a conman. Truman Capote’s greatest fear as a young child was being abandoned, and by the time Capote was four, his mother and father got a divorce, and his parents, both still full of ambition, left Capote with his mother’s three cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. His greatest fear had come true. His life was very lonely, his only friends being his childish, morphine addicted elderly cousin Sook, as well as the future author of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, his neighbor, Nelle Harper Lee. Both children bore the bruises of loneliness and parental rejection, and they bonded over …show more content…
After learning of the murder of four people in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, Capote set off to Holcomb to learn more about it. It was there that a story was started (Becker). Truman Capote combined his love of journalism and knack for fiction writing and created the non-fiction genre. Capote spent around five years in Holcomb, writing about the murder of the Clutter family. He had over six thousand pages of notes on it. He also conducted many interviews with the two men who committed the crime, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Over these five years, Capote became very close with one of them, Perry Smith. He understood Smith, and the way that he dreamed. They were quite similar people, yet Smith had a dark violent side that let him get dragged into Dick Hickock’s plans. Eventually, after witnessing the execution of the two murderers, Truman Capote returned home and finished the novel: In Cold Blood. Once the book was released, it was an instant hit. It made him even more well-known then he had previously been. It was that fame that eventually caused his
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