Some celebrities seem to be not only a product of their own personality, but of their surroundings as well, and never was a backdrop more important to a public figure than New York was to Truman Capote. “Perhaps he could have flourished only in the New York that was a city of literary ambition, the one after World War II, as his biographer, Gerald Clarke, contends. Perhaps he could have flourished in any New York, especially today’s, that prizes talent and a wink, as his friend Gay Talese, the author, contends. But what is clear is that he could not have become Truman Capote in any place but New York… Capote embodied a New York story of exile, triumph and disillusion.”