Truman Capote and Harper Lee:  Early Portraits of Two Alabama Authors

By Sandra Braun

Most of us have read To Kill a Mockingbird at some point in our lives. It is the fascinating story of a rural Alabama town in the 1930s, and the characters who live in it, as seen through the eyes of a young child named Scout Finch.  Its author is a woman named Harper Lee, who is from Monroeville, Alabama. It was her first novel. It won a Pulitzer Prize. And it was her only book.

Interestingly, she lived next door to another person who would go on to great literary fame and fortune. Truman Capote is the author of many works including his most notable, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and also In Cold Blood. The former work became a movie. The latter is a classic American novel based on the events and people surrounding the murder of a family of four in a small Kansas town. The event shook the region and the nation.

Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is said to be the best-selling book in the world next to the Bible. Capote’s In Cold Blood, a treatment of the Kansas murders, spawned a whole new genre of writing that continues today – the genre of the historical novel. His many other works have been the subject of some 20 films works and he has been named one of the most influential people of the 20^th century.

Both Lee and Capote grew up in Monroeville, Alabama. And both were social misfits.

Nelle (pronounced ‘nel’) Harper Lee was born in Monroeville in 1926, the youngest of 4 children. She was a tomboy, utterly devoted to her father, and was often seen clipping at heels about town. She was a rough and tumble gal who was quick to deck you and make you eat gravel – a regular female Huck Finn, according to her biographer. “She was just like a boy!” says Taylor Faircloth, a childhood friend.

She was quick to take you on in the classroom, too. She had an excellent vocabulary and was a good student. This made for a quick wit, a sharp mind, and a student who challenged her teachers on almost all matters of education and even curriculum. She simply did not accept things hook, line and sinker.

They likely met when Capote arrived in Monroeville to live with his aunts. Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924, but when he was about four years old, his parents divorced and he was sent to live with his maternal aunts in Monroeville.  He was shuttled between New Orleans and Monroeville on a regular basis. There were no other young children on the block besides Truman and Nelle, and thus, at some point, they established themselves as regular playmates.

He was a shy, fair-haired, and quiet child who carried around a pocket dictionary (said to be given him by Nelle’s father) and a notepad.  He seemed small and frail and was often picked on. She was sassy, saucy and packed a good punch.  It has been suggested that they found in each other an understanding of what it was like to be unconventional in a highly conventional world.  She was the girl who wasn’t quite “girlie” enough and he was a boy that was, well, “too girlie”. She was a rough and tumble gal in whom, no doubt, Truman may have found some safety and refuge – an odd, but understandable pairing of the sissy and the tomboy.

 And they shared a passion for a good story. In addition to playing marbles and skipping rocks, they also wrote stories together .  And they also read together -- Sherlock Holmes, The Rover Boys, and Seckatary Hawkings. They also fought. “Keep your hands off my pictures, Nelle,” Capote would say. “Shut up or I’ll knock your block off,” she’d reply.  And they remained inseparable.

At some point in Nelle’s elementary years, her father gave her an Underwood typewriter. She and Truman used it to pound out stories.  (Capote, not one to share attention, often said in later life that he dictated the stories while Nelle typed – but, somehow, I don’t picture her taking blind orders from a boy whose block she regularly knocked off).  When Capote was 10 years old, he wrote a story about Nelle’s mother and her nosy ways, called it “Old Mrs. Busybody” and sent it for publication to The Mobile Register.  It became his first publication.

Truman’s mother interrupted his mint julep life by whisking him off to New York to live with her and new husband, Joseph Capote, who eventually adopted Truman and have him his name. He spent the remainder of his adolescent years in New York, joining the New York literary society in 1941 by the age of 17. He continued his love of writing and became published again in 1948 – and so he was considered the more “formidable” writer of the two.  Lee was in awe of him in this regard. In fact, she barely considered herself a writer. When she later became famous and would meet another famous author, she has been known to comment “I’ve always wondered what it was like to meet an author.”

 Nelle eventually followed Truman to New York to also pursue a writing career. (She got there via Huntingdon College in Birmingham and University of Alabama Law School in Tuscaloosa – but that’s another story. She did, by the way, write for the University of Alabama newspaper, The Crimson White, and also another campus publication, The Rammer Jammer).

Both were part of the 50s New York arts scene as they developed their writing careers. They shared many high profile acquaintances.  Here is where the two are a picture of contrasts. Nelle kept largely to herself while Capote insisted on lighting up every room with his electric personality and presence. He was only 5’4”. He had a high-pitched voice and had what was experienced by others as odd mannerisms. He was openly homosexual. And he loved to weave tales – some true, some not true, and many somewhere in between.  (His penchant for telling a tale simply to get attention was perhaps epitomized in his final book which was never published;  it was to be a “tell all” about all the famous people he knew – including Lee. Only thing was, like the boy who cried wolf, it was difficult to extract fact from fiction and Nelle would  consider it a great betrayal that would put a permanent wedge in their relationship).  He was always the life of the party, made grand entrances, was into high fashion, and was one of those who simply sucked the air out of the room upon his arrival. It has been said that he had a tremendous need for praise and attention, stemming from childhood abandonment issues.

When Capote was assigned by The New Yorker to cover the Kansas murders for an upcoming magazine article, he asked Harper to accompany him as his research assistant. It was a good thing he did, because by many accounts, he totally “turned off” the people of the town with his “uppity” ways, style of dress, and odd mannerisms.  In Cold Blood may never have come into existence. He was a character to whom they simply could not relate and they just didn’t want to talk to him. Nelle, on the other hand, retained her understanding of common-folk, never really leaving her hometown roots, splitting her time between Monroeville and New York. She secured proper working relations and easy conversations and took copious notes, all of which became Capote’s saving grace in researching and developing the soon-to-be classic.   (He did, eventually win the townspeople over, but only after Nelle smoothed many waters!). He could have shown more gratitude toward her, however, but he was simply too self-centered. She was never given her due with regard to her contribution on a novel that occupies literary history. Instead, she shares the dedication page with Capote’s life-long lover, Jack, but it is hardly fitting in light of her contribution.  Some literary scholars have gone so far as to assert that Nelle actually wrote the book – something she has not denied.  So self-absorbed was Capote, that at the opening of Nelle’s movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, he was too preoccupied with issues surrounding the writing of his own book to really pay much attention to his childhood friend’s achievements. Instead of outwardly and proactively congratulating her, he simply made reference to the fact that Dill, a character in the book, was loosely based on him. He was simply very stingy with praise, as if there was only a certain amount of it to go around, and he needed it all. But Nelle was never one to need it anyway. She was happy to congratulate and support him, and go her own way.

Also in contrast to Capote, Harper shunned the spotlight – perhaps she wanted Truman to get all he needed. She did the obligatory junkets to promote the book and the movie, but has consistently turned down interviews consistently since then. The only existing biography of her is unauthorized. More than likely, she is just not comfortable in the spotlight and refuses to play to it. She does not like to dress up, wears no makeup, and has a caustic tongue and razor-sharp wit that can send any journalist home with tucked tail.  Hardly a recipe for center stage.

Both of them achieved fame and then dropped out of sight.  Capote’s final and seminal work, In Cold Blood, was his last, but not by choice. It was published in 1966 and after that he began a long descent of depression and misery that resulted in alcoholism, and his death in 1984. He did attempt another work but was unable to continue with it over the years (his “tell-all” book). It has been suggested that his experience writing In Cold Blood did him in --  that in writing it, he encountered many situations that exacerbated his personal demons and emotionally paralyzed him, and that he never got over the trauma of witnessing the executions of the two killers.

Lee lives today where her story starts -- in Monroeville. She never married. She never had children. She continues to avoid attention and dislikes talking about her book.  In the nearby Old Courthouse Museum is an exhibit dedicated to Truman Capote. And so, in this sense, the two misfits who were as different as they were alike, remain together, bound together by the soil that produced them.

For more information see:

Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (1988)

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (2006)

Capote (biographical film) was released in 2005