Understanding Truman Capote

Resource Information

The work Understanding Truman Capote represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Houston Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Understanding Truman Capote

Statement of responsibility

Thomas Fahy

Creator

• Fahy, Thomas Richard

Author

• Fahy, Thomas Richard

Subject

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Capote, Truman, 1924-1984
• Capote, Truman, 1924-1984 -- Criticism and interpretation

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

Truman Capote--along with his most famous works In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's--continues to have a powerful hold over the American popular imagination. His glamorous lifestyle, which included hobnobbing with the rich and famous and frequenting the most elite nightclubs in Manhattan, makes him the subject of ongoing interest for public and academic audiences alike. In Understanding Truman Capote, Thomas Fahy provides a new direction for Capote studies that offers a way to reconsider the author's work. 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 1940s and 1950s. Understanding Truman Capote 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 Capote studies 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

Member of

• Understanding contemporary American literature

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

813/.54

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PS3505.A59

LC item number

Z645 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Understanding contemporary American literature