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When Truman Capote saw the NY Times headline in November 1959 of the murders of the Clutter family of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon in Holcomb, Kansas that would become his book In Cold Blood, he was not thinking of the family that had just been executed in their home or the even the killers, although all of it was immediately appealing. He was thinking of himself. His immediate phone call to The New Yorker was because he recognized the elements of an opportunity that matched what he was looking for with very specific criteria that also matched the level of sensationalism he desperately desired. Those specific criteria had to do with the model he would use to write another work, and the criteria matched exactly....

Upon Willa Cather’s passing her life companion Edith Lewis was dealing with something more than Truman Capote’s plagiarism of Willa’s works. Truman’s proclivity to abuse was going further over the line than that even in the early years and would become more persistent and assuming as the years passed despite Edith’s efforts to ward him off in public perception without drawing overt attention to the problem, just awareness and protecting Willa and the nature of the literature. As far as the public could see, that wasn’t much of a problem in that Truman was making sure that he was the most famous person with the identity of ‘writer,’ certainly a free landscape to enter, and his presumed connection to Willa...

The distilled ardor, the astonished, silenced respect, hangs in the air as Willa Cather describes her “A Chance Meeting” with “’Caro’ of the Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline,” Flaubert’s niece whom he raised and of whom he wrote. For Willa what was so unexpectedly happening in this auspicious encounter was laden with the immensity of her own childhood literary personal history looking back at her, speaking to her. They had this shared childhood in a summit of literature, and here now was the little girl, now as an old woman who had lived that reality in the very home of Flaubert as the works were being written, and an eloquent and learned Caroline, too, a help in that. Willa, who had...

The public didn't pick up on the predictable patterns of Truman Capote's malignant narcissism, just as they accept it as innocuous now, the rattlesnake again in the grass with Taylor Swift. But as Willa Cather's literary executor, her life-partner Edith Lewis knew she could show the radical difference: it was in the spirit of the works and the Being, and what that extraordinarily opens in the tremendous for all of us. It's now there to be found. It's what gay socialite and Willa Cather's close friend Stephen Tennant would write about Willa and that become his literary legacy, what Audrey Hepburn would audaciously risk herself in showing, what extraordinary scholar and biographer E. K. Brown would write in intensity as...

Truman Capote himself said he had no content. He said that he was a liar. He showed his desperate need and intent to invade personal lives past boundaries and cause as much harm as possible for fame. Truman Capote demonstrated malignant narcissism, his patterned personality disorder in every line written and every action and in his obsessive preening for constant attention. Why did no one believe him when he said what he was? As narcissists do, he assumed ownership of other people—and now we can see—their writing. Personality disorders distort perception in their own head and then manipulate that perception with others.Now we can look at the evidence at the beginning of Truman Capote’s career of manipulation of fame and...