Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable." In the same essay Capote describes how a visit to his childhood home brought back memories that catalyzed his writing. In an article titled A Voice from a Cloud in the November 1967 edition of Harper's Magazine, Capote acknowledged the autobiographical nature of Other Voices, Other Rooms. He wrote " Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons, an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. According to Clarke, the photo created an "uproar" and gave Capote "not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted." Truman claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity." Much of the early attention to Capote centered around different interpretations of this photograph, which was viewed as a suggestive pose by some. A 1947 Harold Halma photograph, used to promote the book, showed the then-23-year-old Capote reclining and gazing into the camera. Gerald Clarke, a modern biographer, observed, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on the dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. The promotion and controversy surrounding this novel catapulted Capote to fame.
This much-discussed 1947 Harold Halma photo on the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms.
When Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948, it stayed on The New York Times Bestseller list for nine weeks, selling more than 26,000 copies. The other three novels are Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar. Other Voices, Other Rooms is ranked number 26 on a list of the top 100 gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999. More than fifty years after its publication, Anthony Slide notes that Other Voices, Other Rooms is one of only four familiar gay novels of the first half of the twentieth century. Authors as well as critics, weighed in Somerset Maugham remarked that Capote was "the hope of modern literature."Īfter Capote pressured the editor George Davis for his assessment of the novel, he quipped, "I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn." Some twenty-five years later, Ian Young points out that Other Voices, Other Rooms notably avoided the period convention of an obligatory tragedy, typically involving suicide, murder, madness, despair or accidental death for the gay protagonist. Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation about Capote's "striking literary virtuosity" and praised "his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and varied rhythms of speech." Capote was compared to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, and even Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. Mostly positive reviews came from a variety of publications including The New York Herald Tribune, but The New York Times published a dismissive review. Literary critics of the day were eager to review Capote's novel and express their opinions.
Harold halma photograph of capote movie#
Prior to its even being published, 20th Century Fox optioned movie rights to the novel without having seen the work. Additionally, Life magazine conferred Capote equal space alongside other writers such as Gore Vidaland Jean Stafford in an article about young American writers, even though he had never published a novel. The novel's reception began before the novel hit bookshelves.
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