Capote, Truman (1924 - 1984), Fiction Writers

writer, was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, the son of Arch Persons, a salesman and drifter, and sixteen-year-old Lillie Mae “Nina” Faulk. His parents’ turbulent marriage dissolved when Truman was six. After his mother entered business colleges in Selma, Alabama, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1929, Truman—who had been neglected and psychologically abused—was relegated a year later to her distant cousins in Monroeville, Alabama, population 1,355. “This was a very strange household,” he commented once. “It consisted of three elderly ladies and an elderly uncle. They...

writer, was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, the son of Arch Persons, a salesman and drifter, and sixteen-year-old Lillie Mae “Nina” Faulk. His parents’ turbulent marriage dissolved when Truman was six. After his mother entered business colleges in Selma, Alabama, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1929, Truman—who had been neglected and psychologically abused—was relegated a year later to her distant cousins in Monroeville, Alabama, population 1,355. “This was a very strange household,” he commented once. “It consisted of three elderly ladies and an elderly uncle. They were the people who had adopted my mother—her own parents had died when she was very young. I lived there until I was ten, and it was a very lonely life, and it was then that I became interested in writing” (Roy Newquist, Counterpoint [1964], p. 76). In Monroeville his chief companions were his childlike guardian Sook Faulk and the young and tomboyish Harper Lee, who in later life wrote the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and who in the 1960s assisted Truman by gathering facts for his documentary In Cold Blood (1965).