Music for Chameleons

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Authors: Truman Capote

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary Collections, #Essays

BOOK: Music for Chameleons
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TRUMAN CAPOTE

Music for Chameleons

Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, 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 (
A Tree of Night
, among others), novels and novellas (
The Grass Harp
and
Break fast at Tiffany’s
), some of the best travel writing of our time (
Local Color
), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in
The New Yorker
(
The Duke in His Domain
and
The Muses Are Heard
), a true crime masterpiece (
In Cold Blood
), several short memoirs about his childhood in the South (
A Christmas Memory
,
The Thanksgiving Visitor
, and
One Christmas
), two plays (
The Grass Harp
and
House of Flowers
), and two films (
Beat the Devil
and
The Innocents
).

Mr. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.

SECOND VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2012

Copyright © 1975, 1977, 1979, 1980 by Truman Capote

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1980.

The selections in this book have previously appeared in the following publications:
Esquire, Interview
magazine,
McCall’s
magazine and
The New Yorker
.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.:
The Preface is reprinted courtesy of
Vogue
, copyright © 1979 by
The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Capote, Truman, 1924–1984
Music for chameleons/by Truman Capote.—1st Vintage international ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3505.A59M8 1994
813.’54—dc20 93-42198

eISBN: 978-0-345-80308-5

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Megan Wilson
Cover image © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

v3.1_r1

 

For Tennessee Williams

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

I Music for Chameleons

One
Music for Chameleons

Two
Mr. Jones

Three
A Lamp in a Window

Four
Mojave

Five
Hospitality

Six
Dazzle

II Handcarved Coffins

A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime

III Conversational Portraits

One
A Day’s Work

Two
Hello, Stranger

Three
Hidden Gardens

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