Music for Chameleons

In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders then with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old girl he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, remainds one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of our time.

Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, <b>Other Voices, Other Rooms</b>, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America's postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (<b>A Tree of Night</b>, among others), novels and novellas (<b>The Grass Harp</b> and <b>Breakfast at Tiffany's</b>), some of the best travel writing of our time (<b>Local Color</b>), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in <b>The New Yorker</b> (<b>The Duke in His Domain</b> and <b>The Muses Are Heard</b>), a true-crime masterpiece (<b>In Cold Blood</b>), several short memiors about his childhood in the