Too brief a treat

by Truman Capote

"In Too Brief a Treat, the biographer Gerald Clarke brings together for the first time the private letters of Truman Capote. Spanning more than four decades, these letters reveal the inner life of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing personalities. As Clarke notes in his Introduction, Capote was an inveterate correspondent who both loved and craved love without inhibition. He wrote letters as he spoke: emphatically, spontaneously, and passionately. He also wrote them at a breakneck pace, unconcerned with posterity. Thus, in this volume we have perhaps the closest thing possible to an elusive treasure: a Capote autobiography." "Through his letters to the likes of William Styron and Gloria Vanderbilt, as well as to his publishers and editors, his longtime companion and lover Jack Dunphy, and others, we see Capote in all his life's phases - the uncannily self-possessed naif who jumped headlong into the dynamic post-World War II New York literary scene, and the more mature, estab