Born in New Orleans, 1924, dead in Los Angeles 1984.

Long absence from his mother, he lived a long time with his aunts. He
moved a lot as a kid. His troubled childhood inspired a lot his work (for
instance his first novel, Other Voices Other Rooms, a lot of his tales).

He began as a short story writer. The preface of Music for Chameleons.

Began to work with 17 years old in the New Yorker. He was realted with
journalism since an early day.

He wrote various novels and short stories. The art of herb, maybe the most
famous one would be Breakfast at Tiffanys. in cold blood (1966), brought
him literary acclaim and became an international bestseller, but Capote
would never complete another novel after it.

REASON l The reason was I wanted to make an experiment in journalistic

writing, and I was looking for a subject that would have sufficient
proportions. I'd already done a great deal of narrative journalistic writing in
this experimental vein in the 1950s for The New Yorker... But I was looking
for something very special that would give me a lot of scope. I had come up
with two or three different subjects and each of them for whatever reasons
was a dry run after I'd done a lot of work on them. 1974, San Francisco
Film Festival

LAST story of Music for Chameleons already say a non fiction account of an
American crime. It turned up to be false.

PRECEDENTS

Works of history or biography have often used the narrative devices of

fiction to depict real-world events. Scholars have suggested that Operacin
Masacre (1957) by Argentine author and journalist Rodolfo Walsh was the
first non-fiction novel. Caption and shooting of peronist militants in 1956

He once claimed[citation needed] that everything within the book would be true, word for
word. Although this is impossible, the majority of information is accurate and extremely
detailed. Capote was able to interview the murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
This meant that he was able to establish their characters, making the details within the
book extremely accurate. The way in which the book is written objectively means that
Capote has little influence over the granular facts of the case. The creative choices he
can make are those of tone and tenor. He can modulate the readers' sympathy toward the
subjects, the killers.

Capote argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person narration and,
ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. After the publication of In Cold Blood,
many authors tested the form's "original" concept; notably including Hunter S.
Thompson (1966's Hell's Angels), Norman Mailer (1968's Armies of the Night) and Tom
Wolfe (1968's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).
Music for chameleons, a collection of writings published in 1980. Mixing
fiction and no-fiction. Part two, the core of the book, consists of a single
piece: "Handcarved Coffins, then the third part conversation portrait, is a
compilation of conversations with various people, including himself (the last
tale) and Marilyn. The style is different because its written as it was a script:
the name of each characters with only a bit of intervation of the narrator (at
the beginng, for instance).

MATERIAL A PARTIR DE LA ENTREVISTA

The decision was based on a theory I've harbored since I first began to write
professionally, which is well over 20 years ago. It seemed to me that
journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the
"nonfiction novel," as I thought of it. Several admirable reporters--Rebecca
West for one, and Joseph Mitchell and Lillian Ross--have shown the
possibilities of narrative reportage; and Miss Ross, in her brilliant "Picture,"
achieved at least a nonfiction novella. Still, on the whole, journalism is the
most underestimated, the least explored of literary mediums.