Truman Capote

Capote grew up shuttled between relatives in rural Alabama, where a young Harper Lee was his childhood neighbor and lifelong friend, before landing in New York, where he worked as a copyboy at The New Yorker and published the acclaimed Other Voices, Other Rooms at twenty-three. Breakfast at Tiffany's, his novella about a Manhattan café society drifter, made him famous a decade later.

A brief 1959 newspaper item about a Kansas farm family's murder sent him to Holcomb with Lee as his research partner; the six years of interviews that followed, including a close, possibly romantic relationship with killer Perry Smith, produced In Cold Blood, which he called a 'nonfiction novel.' He celebrated its success with the 1966 Black and White Ball, one of the era's most famous parties.

Chapters of his unfinished final novel, Answered Prayers, savaged the socialite friends who had taken him in, and most of them cut him off; alcoholism and drug addiction consumed his last years until his death in 1984.