The Truman show

How did a small, effeminate, erratically educated Southern boy scale such heights? For a start, it feels wrong, somehow, that we think of Capote as pure Dixie. He was born in New Orleans in 1924, and spent his early childhood in Alabama, but his sensibilities were equally influenced by the North, since after age nine he lived in and around New York and Connecticut. He had homes in California, Manhattan, Long Island and Switzerland, but never settled south of the Mason-Dixon line again. This interplay of oppositions, found in every corner of his life, helps explain his complicated personality; how, for example, he could claim to despise rejection in any form, but also gloat, "I am never unkind to anyone. I mean, except intentionally."

Capote's parents split up when he was tiny, leaving him in the care of his mother's elderly cousins in rural Alabama. He was emotionally adrift, desperately lonely and misunderstood. His childhood friend, Harper Lee, who penned To Kill a Mockingbird and acted as Capote's helpmate while researching In Cold Blood, wrote: "We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies."

Truman's teachers thought he was simple, until an IQ test proved him a genius - a fact that surprised him not a bit. "I don't know who was more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn't want to believe it." Starstruck by his own magnificence, the child suffered insomnia until discovering the soporific properties of whisky. It was a harbinger of addictions to come.

After a short stint at the New Yorker, and with several well-received short stories under his belt, Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. His publishers ordered a 10,000-copy first run - substantial for a literary debut, circa 1948. Capote's ensuing success sprang as much from the quality of his prose as from a photo that captured the 23-year-old looking, in the words of Gloria Steinem, like "a kind of teenage marzipan Peter Lorre in a tattersall vest, reclining on a Victorian sofa, and peering myopically into the camera from under corn-silk bangs".

Prior to Other Voices, Capote wrote, and discarded, Summer Crossing, to be published on 1 December by Penguin. Long thought lost or destroyed, this story of a spoiled little rich girl will be seen by some as a template for his later, greater work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, a novella with not a word wasted or misplaced. But Capote rightly notes that Breakfast, published in 1958, starts his second era as a writer, marking a shift in the internal rhythm of his prose. So, while Summer Crossing also concerns a young woman adrift in Manhattan, it's raw, immature and full of problems. Easy enough to see why the man who classed himself a consummate stylist would consign it to a dustbin.

In addition to this new novel, two films arrive in cinemas next February. The first, Capote, is already a critical hit in the States, with talk of an Oscar nod for Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the title role. Critic David Denby called it: "The most intelligent, detailed and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character - in this case a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice and mendacity". It focuses on the time Capote spent in Kansas researching In Cold Blood, and then waiting - often impatiently - for the killers' execution, so he'd have an ending for his book.

Have You Heard?, with British actor Toby Jones as Capote, covers the same ground, but takes as its source material not Gerald Clarke's authoritative biography, which informs the Hoffman project, but George Plimpton's oral biography, comprised of soundbites from Capote's peers, friends and enemies. At the time of writing I've not read any reviews, but the cast is starry, including Sandra Bullock, Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich and a cameo by Gwyneth Paltrow. I suspect that just as one reads both books to get a sense of the light and dark in Capote's nature, both films will be required viewing.

Because he had such a big personality, it's easy to forget that Capote was a dedicated wordsmith. Somerset Maugham called him "the hope of modern literature" and Norman Mailer "the best writer of our generation". His early stories are often damned as a pastiche of Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Working diligently to hone his style, Capote eventually shook off such criticisms. His prose is emotive, but not emotional; he said one must write with a cool heart and head, having digested and processed all the emotions of the tale in advance. He approached his writing tablet with a detailed outline and always knew his ending. (He would not have been amused to read Andy Warhol's diary entry theorising that his long-time consort, Jack Dunphy, actually wrote all of the masterpieces, thus accounting for Capote's limited output after they split.)

"The greatest pleasure of writing," Capote told Gloria Steinem, "is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make." To the Paris Review, he explained: "The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right." It's a test his best stories, such as Breakfast, One Christmas and The Thanksgiving Visitor, ace.

IN 1972 CAPOTE SAID: "IT took me five years to write In Cold Blood and a year to recover - if recover is the word; not a day passes that some aspect of that experience doesn't shadow my mind." His recreation of the brutal murder of four members of the Clutter family by two complicated drifters haunts readers, too, not least because it invites a return. By getting under the skin of both Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, Capote ably laid out their psyches like one performing a dissection. Yet he was not without compassion, especially for Smith, whose background was not dissimilar to his own and who, many contend, Capote came to love deeply.

Once the murderers were hanged, Capote had his book. So how to announce that your long hibernation is over? Why, with a bang - by throwing the party to end all parties. With his usual flair for PR, Capote built up excitement levels, toying with people, taunting them about whether or not they'd be invited, the scorned little boy proving that he, too, could inflict pain.

The guest list glittered with writers, actors and the society doyennes Capote now counted among his closest friends, keeping pace with their lavish lifestyle and soaking up their histories. Plimpton noted, "[He came] from humble beginnings, rose meteorically to this tremendously high standing, not only socially but as a writer, then he made some almost Aristotelian errors of hubris that started his downfall."

Answered Prayers was that act of hubris. Intended as an epic social satire - Capote claimed to have more than 800 manuscript pages, but the actual book is slender and unfinished - it embodies his contention that gossip constitutes literature. "In fact, my entire book is gossip," Capote said. "I don't deny that for an instant. What I say is that all literature is gossip ... What in God's green earth is Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Madame Bovary if not gossip? ... Gossip is the absolute exchange of human communication."

The excrement hit the fan when Esquire published a chapter entitled "La Cote Basque", which employed real names alongside pseudonyms. Its gossip ranges from Gloria Vanderbilt's inability to recognise her first husband to a tale of murder that later formed the basis of Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs Grenvilles.

Overnight, Capote was persona non grata in the swish set. Both sides felt badly used, society dames because he'd betrayed their confidences, Capote because they didn't understand that "the only person an artist has an obligation to is himself. His work means nothing otherwise."

How were these friends taken unawares? Part of Capote's legend is that his first story, published at age eight, was a seven-part serial. Only one episode appeared in the local newspaper, after it transpired that his research consisted of sniffing out local scandals and writing them down. His neighbours were aghast to find their dirtiest laundry on display.

What's more surprising, and sadder, is how his ostracism blindsided Capote, blighting the rest of his life, and undoubtedly shortening it. He wrote little, succumbed to his addictions and acted out, often on television, where he'd appear wrecked out of his skull. Allowing him to go on was patently cruel, but he held a morbid fascination for audiences: once upon a time it was startling to see a man unravelling in public. During one interview Stanley Seigel asked, "What's going to happen, unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?" Capote slurred, "Well, the obvious answer is that eventually I'll kill myself."

Capote was right again. He died in 1984, aged 59, his health severely compromised by alcoholism. His New York Times obit, while highlighting the successes, also pointed out the critical belief that he'd squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure, failings that denied him entry to the pantheon of truly great writers.

I'd rather leave you to ponder Norman Mailer's assessment: "Most of us write in metaphor, while Truman Capote just created one great sentence after another." Surely that's what it's all about?

Summer Crossing is published by Penguin Classics, priced 12. The films Capote and Have You Heard are scheduled for release in February.