Too brief a treat

"In Too Brief a Treat, the biographer Gerald Clarke brings together for the first time the private letters of Truman Capote. Spanning more than four decades, these letters reveal the inner life of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing personalities. As Clarke notes in his Introduction, Capote was an inveterate correspondent who both loved and craved love without inhibition. He wrote letters as he spoke: emphatically, spontaneously, and passionately. He also wrote them at a breakneck pace, unconcerned with posterity. Thus, in this volume we have perhaps the closest thing possible to an elusive treasure: a Capote autobiography." "Through his letters to the likes of William Styron and Gloria Vanderbilt, as well as to his publishers and editors, his longtime companion and lover Jack Dunphy, and others, we see Capote in all his life's phases - the uncannily self-possessed naif who jumped headlong into the dynamic post-World War II New York literary scene, and the more mature, established Capote of the 1950s. Then there is the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote's correspondence with Kansas detective Alvin Dewey, and with Perry Smith, one of the killers profiled in that work, demonstrates the writer's intense devotion to his craft, while his letters to friends like Cecil Beaton show Capote giddy with his emergence as a flamboyant mass-media celebrity following In Cold Blood's publication. Finally, we see Capote later in his life, as things seemed to be unraveling: disillusioned, isolated by his substance abuse and by personal rivalries. (Ever effusive with praise and affection, Capote could nevertheless carry a grudge like few others.)"--BOOK JACKET.