Truman Capote and Postmodernism

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“Truman Capote, as obsessed with fame and fortune as with penning great words, was a writer who became as well-known for his late-night talk show appearances as for his prose” (Patterson 1). Capote was a literary pop star at the height of his fame in 1966, after he had written such classic books as, Other Rooms, Other Voices, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and In Cold Blood. Postmodernism was a literary period that began after the Second World War and was a rejection of traditional writing techniques. It used fragmented sentences and questionable narrators, as well as many other unconventional techniques, to break the previous barriers of literature. Truman Capote was a major player in the postmodern game, using his own broken childhood to sympathize with a convicted murderer, and invent an entirely new genre of non-fiction literature known as the true crime genre.
The first and possibly most important fact about Truman Capote is that he did not have a happy, or even decent, childhood. His parents split up when he was very young at which point he began to travel around the south with his mother. During this time, Capote’s mother would lock him into hotel rooms for entire days at a time and give the waiting staff specific instructions to ignore his cries. Capote attributes his free-floating anxiety to his mother’s locking him into hotel rooms. As an adult, Capote said about his mother, "She locked me in and I still can't get out". His disturbing childhood is one of the forces that took part in shaping his personality, and ultimately his voice on the page. Capote’s childhood is also one of the things that made connect so strongly with Perry Smith, the murder in his “Non-fiction Novel” In Cold Blood (Kim 4). During Capote’s long interviews ...

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...Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1966. Print.
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