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Also Recommended
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A Psychological Profile
Dan P. McAdams, Todd Schultz
£18.99
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Tiny Terror
Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers
William Todd Schultz
197 pages
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127 x 178mm
978-0-19-975204-1
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Hardback
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26 May 2011
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- The first psychobiography of Truman Capote
- The first book to look closely and carefully at Answered Prayers, Capote's final, unfinished novel, a book perplexing for its element of self-destructiveness
- Explores the subject of writing as self-destruction as opposed to self-therapy, and the relationship between writers and high society
Truman Capote was one of the most gifted and flamboyant writers of his generation, renowned for such books as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and his masterpiece, the nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. What has received comparatively little attention, however, is Capote's last, unfinished book, Answered Prayers, a merciless skewering of cafe society and the high-class women Capote called his "swans." When excerpts appeared he was immediately blacklisted, ruined socially, labeled a pariah. Capote recoiled—disgraced, depressed, and all but friendless.
In Tiny Terror, a new volume in Oxford's Inner Lives series, William Todd Schultz sheds light on the life and works of Capote and answers the perplexing mystery—why did Capote write a book that would destroy him? Drawing on an arsenal of psychological techniques, Schultz illuminates Capote's early years in the South—a time that Capote himself described as a "snake's nest of No's"—no parents to speak of, no friends but books, no hope, no future. Out of this dark childhood emerged Capote's prominent dual life-scripts: neurotic Capote, anxious, vulnerable, hypersensitive, expecting to be hurt; and Capote the disagreeable destroyer, emotionally bulletproof, nasty, and bent on revenge. Schultz shows how Capote would strike out when he felt hurt or taken for granted, engaging in caustic feuds
with Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and many other writers. And Schultz reveals how this tendency fed into Answered Prayers, an exceedingly corrosive and thinly disguised roman a clef that trashed his high-society friends.
What emerges by the end of this book is a cogent, immensely insightful portrait of an artist on the edge, brilliantly but self-destructively biting the jet-set hands that fed him. Anyone interested in the inner life of one of America's most fascinating literary personalities will find this book a revelation.Readership: General readers, psychologists, psychobiographers, literature scholars, and fans of Truman Capote
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William Todd Schultz, Professor, Pacific University William Todd Schultz, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. Over the past two decades he's written numerous psychobiographical articles and book chapters, on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Roald Dahl, James Agee, and Jack Kerouac, among others. He is editor of the Handbook of Psychobiography, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
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Chapter 1 - Consistently Inconsistent Consistency
Chapter 2 - A Snake's Nest of No's
Chapter 3 - Leaving the Boy Behind?
Chapter 4 - The Mind of a Murderer
Chapter 5 - Frying Fancy Fish
Chapter 6 - Preparations for the Scaffold of a Personality Portrait
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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