''Local Color'' is the third published book by the
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
author
An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states:
"''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...
Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, ...
, released in the Fall of 1950. ''Local Color'' includes notes and sketches about persons and places, including
travel journal
The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.
One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE. In the early modern period ...
-style essays on cities and countries Capote had lived in or visited.
''Local Color'' was published while Capote was vacationing in
Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
.
Conception
Because Capote was in the habit of working with a number of fashionable magazines he was very keen to take a personal part in the layout and formatting of the physical book, including color schemes and photographic layouts.
Contents
The book includes nine vignettes:
* "
"
* "
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
"
* "
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
"
* "
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
"
* "
Haiti
Haiti (; ht, Ayiti ; French: ), officially the Republic of Haiti (); ) and formerly known as Hayti, is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and ...
"
* "To
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
"
* "
Ischia
Ischia ( , , ) is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It lies at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, about from Naples. It is the largest of the Phlegrean Islands. Roughly trapezoidal in shape, it measures approximately east to west ...
"
* "
Tangier
Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the cap ...
"
* "A Ride Through Spain"
Reception and critical analysis
''Local Color'' received mixed reviews upon its publication. It received a brief unfavorable review from the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
''. The ''
Boston Sunday Herald'' gave Capote's writing an unfavorable review, but praised some of the work's photography. ''
The Providence Sunday Journal'' offered a positive review of Capote's writing style, stating:
:"very good since it is characterized by varied, lively writing, immediate and honest; it is selective, rather romantically coloured, and there is not too much self-intrusion from the author."
Sales of ''Local Color'' reached approximately 4,500 books total.
[Clarke, Gerald. ''Capote: a Biography'' (1998) Carroll & Graff. p. 224]
References
;Notes
;Bibliography
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External links
{{Capote
Books by Truman Capote
Essay collections by Truman Capote
Random House books