About this Book

Truman Capote once remarked, ?My primary thing is that I’m a prose writer. I don’t think film is the greatest living thing.' Nonetheless, his legacy is in many ways defined by his complex relationship with cinema, Hollywood, and celebrity itself. In Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies, Tison Pugh explores the author and his literature 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 constitute his fraught relationship with the Hollywood machine.

Capote’s masterful short stories and novels ensure his status as an iconic author of the twentieth century, and his screenplays, including Beat the Devil, Indiscretion of an American Wife, and The Innocents, allowed him to collaborate with such Hollywood heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, and David O. Selznick. Throughout his professional life he circulated freely in a celebrity milieu populated by such notables as Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Cinematic adaptations of his literature, most notably Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, play with or otherwise alter Capote’s queer literary themes, often bleaching his daring treatment of homosexuality in favor of heterosexual romance.

Pugh reveals Capote’s literary works to be not merely coincident to film but integral to their mutual creation, paying keen attention to the ways in which Capote’s identity as a gay southerner influenced his and others’ perceptions of his literature and its adaptations. His research illuminates Capote's personal and professional successes and disappointments in the film industry, helping to create a more nuanced portrait of the author and bringing fresh details to light.

"Tison Pugh gives us a thoroughly researched, interpretive, and insightful examination of all the ways Capote's writing talents, conspicuous celebrity, and uncloseted sexuality intersected in movies and television. His book is an invaluable contribution to the fullest possible picture of one of America's greatest, most versatile, and most conspicuous writers."
—Ralph F. Voss, author of Truman Capote and the Legacy of "In Cold Blood"

TISON PUGH is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queer Chivalry: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature, Queering Medieval Genres, and coeditor of Queer Movie Medievalisms, among other titles.

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The South on Screen

The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org

ISBN 978-0-8203-4669-4