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Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others

In these memoirs Donald Windham spans forty years of American literary life. With intimate details, he focuses on Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, but other writers — Gore Vidal, Isak Dinesen, and Andre Gide — appear. Part One, "Footnote to a Friendship," introduces a gaminlike Capote enjoying his first success in 1948. With close-up views of frequent encounters over three decades, Windham vividly pictures how Capote's charm shreds and his storytelling declines into ever bolder fantasies so that by the time of Answered Prayers, when his friendship with Windham ends, the bewildered and bewildering Capote has left reality far behind. Part Two, "As if...," traces the more complex friendship that began in 1940 when Windham and Williams were poor and struggling to make their names. They collaborated on a play, You Touched Me, and more than thirty years later Windham edited Williams's correspondence with him. Before Williams's death, shadowed by growing bitterness and alienation, this friendship, too, ended. Now Windham examines Williams's character, life, and work, year by year, peeling away layer after layer of masks and legends, to arrive at a uniquely personal understanding.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 270
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780688069476
  • Genres
  • memoir, biography, lgbt
  • Release date
  • 1987