Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons, in New Orleans on 30 September 1924. His parents divorced when he was four, and some years later his mother married again, this time a well-to-do businessman named Capote, whose surname his stepson chose to adopt. In the interim the child lived a life of alternating instability and warm security as he was handed from one set of relatives to another in the rural South. Capote made up stories to help deal with his loneliness and his separation from both parents, and by age ten, or thereabouts, he had decided to become a professional writer. This determination led him to ignore formal schooling, although following his mother's second marriage he attended the Trinity School and St. John's Academy in New York and the public schools of Greenwich, Connecticut. Capote has said that all through his adolescence he was working steadily toward becoming a...