‘The trouble with being a bad boy is that people don’t remember you were once very, very good. In author Truman Capote’s last years, his cringingly public displays of drunkenness and drug use caused old friends to wring their hands over his squandered talent. By his death in 1984, the shambles of his personal life had dwarfed his literary reputation.’
From The Wilson Quarterly’s Periodical Observer, on Brooke Allen’s “Capote Reconsidered,” in The New Criterion.