A short and pungent New Yorker-style profile/extended essay of one of the great literary talents and some would say underachievers of American literature.

A close look at the genesis of one of America's great modern writers Robert Emmet Long presents a full account of Truman Capote's early life, making use of Capote's unpublished papers. Topics covered include his strange relationship with his beautiful but immature mother (she was sixteen years old when capote was born) as well as his friendships with a series of rich and talented women. Combining biographical insights with literary criticism, Truman Capote, Enfant Terrible presents a grand overview of a complex and fascinating author: one who remained a child in appearance and behavior; a southerner who strayed from the south; a celebrity while living in the most solitary realm of his vast imagination.

“Does an admirable job of examining Capote as a writer whose work reflects America of the late 1940s and 1950s more deeply than previously thought.” —Ralph F. Voss, author of Truman Capote and the Legacy of “In Cold Blood” Truman Capote—and his most famous works, In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s—continue to have a powerful hold over the American popular imagination, along with his glamorous lifestyle, which included hobnobbing with the rich and famous and frequenting the most elite nightclubs in Manhattan. In Understanding Truman Capote, Thomas Fahy offers a way to reconsider the author’s place in literary criticism, the canon, and the classroom. By reading Capote’s work in its historical context, Fahy reveals the politics shaping his writing and refutes any notion of Capote as disconnected from the political. Instead this study positions him as a writer deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the postwar years. It also applies a highly interdisciplinary framework to the author’s writing that includes discussions of McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare, automobile culture, juvenile delinquency, suburbia, Beat culture, the early civil rights movement, female sexuality as embodied by celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, and atomic age anxieties. This new approach to studying Capote will be of interest in the fields of literature, history, film, suburban studies, sociology, gender/sexuality studies, African American literary studies, and American and cultural studies. Capote’s writing captures the isolation, marginalization, and persecution of those who deviated from or failed to achieve white middle-class ideals and highlights the artificiality of mainstream idealizations about American culture. His work reveals the deleterious consequences of nostalgia, the insidious impact of suppression, the dangers of Cold War propaganda, and the importance of equal rights. Ultimately, Capote’s writing reflects a critical engagement with American culture that challenges us to rethink our understanding of the 1940s and 1950s.

Pugh explores Capote through a cinematic lens, skillfully weaving the most relevant elements of Capote's biography with insightful critical analysis of the films, screenplays, and adaptations of his works that composed his fraught relationship with the Hollywood machine.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

"The thing I like to do most in the world is talk," Capote once said, & talk he does in the more than two dozen interviews collected in this book.

The tragic sentiment of Southern literature and its heteronormative perspective are foundational attributes generally accepted by both popular and scholarly audiences. Yet a pantheon of great authors ranging from like Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote to present-day voices of Alice Walker, John Waters, and David Sedaris, collectively attest to both the vibrancy of queer experience and the prevalence of humor found in this rich regional cannon. In Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon, Tison Pugh challenges the premises that elevate William Faulkner and diminish Florence King, that esteem Walker Percy yet marginalize David Sedaris, by arguing for the inclusion of gay comic authors as long-standing, defining voices in the field. By redefining the tenets of Southern literature Pugh reveals long-overlooked or discounted aspects of gay humor within the South's literary realm. Noting, for example, that Tennessee Williams is revered as a dramatist who probes the heart of the human condition rather than for his submerged camp humor, and Truman Capote's comic cinema and literature never eclipsed serious works, Pugh establishes a history of mainstream and academic critique that ignored queer humor. Likewise, Florence King and Rita Mae Brown wrote defining narratives of Southern lesbian experience in, respectively, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady and Rubyfruit Jungle, yet, according to Pugh, they are almost entirely neglected in accounts of the literary South. More recently, the author shows, the critical reception of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina testifies to an overarching interest in the traumatic aspects of her poetry and fiction rather than in her humor and its cathartic power. Pugh also asserts that David Sedaris, as a writer of the "post-Southern South," who appears to fall beyond the parameters of regional literature for many readers, creates a new, humorous vision of the region that recognizes both its pained history and its grudging accession to modernity. Drawing from works of key southern writers Pugh sets forth a new vision of Southern literature emerges -- one illuminated by the humor of gay voices no longer at the margins.

"Perseverance is much more important than talent. Because so many talented people fall by the wayside." --James Michener The history of writing is full of authors striving to succeed in a hyper-competitive publishing world, contending with agents, editors, publishers, critics, and sometimes the greatest challenge of all - overnight success. For all of the extaordinary changes that have recently taken place, however, there are a few things that remain the same. Getting published still requires persistence, preparation, and smarts, as well as an understanding of how the business works, where it's been, and where it's going. An Insider's Guide to Publishing pulls back the industry curtain for millions of published and aspiring authors, revealing Hemingway's famous feuds, Poe's raving madness, Capote's vengeful wit, and much more. With clever insights and dark humor to spare, David Comfort, a thirty-year veteran of the publishing trenches, explores the achivements and faultures of literary masters and editorial workaholics to show readers how they, too, can: • Use their creativity and composure to overcome publishing pitfalls. • Work with agents, editors, publishers, and critics like a pro. • Deal with rejection - and success - while avoiding the madhouse. • Navigate the pros and cons of both traditional and self-publishing. An Insider's Guide to Publishing shares the wicked wit and wisdom of some of the craziest and most ambitious authors and editors of all time - proving that even the talented need luck, pluck, persistence, and the inside scoop on this rapidly changing industry in order to succeed!

The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.