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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...

After Posing As Prodigy and “Nascent Innocent Available Sexuality” On the Cover of His Plagiarized First Novel Aiming For Solicited Spectacle Fame, How Truman Capote Made Up Having Had A Personal Relationship With Author Willa Cather* When It Was Actually Stephen Tennant Who Was Her Young, Gay, Learned Literary Friend, And Whose Details Truman Based His Lie On, The Deceit He Repeated The Rest Of His Life (*Willa wrote of a “chance encounter” in France in meeting Flaubert’s niece, collected in Willa Cather In Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey) And The Intrepid Stand That Audrey Hepburn Took To Change the Fabrication Back to the Real Course "Art is not life, and it is not a substitute for...

Already ‘The Best Year of the Millennium’: From a 2024 New Year’s Eve Breakfast at Tiffany’s Cat Bar in Japan and Anderson Cooper’s Times Square Infectious Giggle, We Culminate on a Note First Discerned in the 1960s at Truman Capote’s Self-Entitled ‘Party of the Century’ (and Anderson Was There—In the Womb!) . . . Not to Mention that Truman’s Last Word on the Matter, His Last Word, was a Story Written about Willa Cather Intended for a Birthday in October 1984—The Moment Katy Perry was Born. Read On, Party-Goers, and Get Ready for the Roaring Holidays! "Cecil [Beaton's] friendship with Truman would play a role in the 1960s of how Truman would try to covertly publicly humiliate and undercut Audrey for taking...