The Swans of Fifth Avenue

As a work of historical fiction, The Swans of Fifth Avenue dramatizes the interactions and inner lives of real people, including its two main characters, Truman Capote and Babe Paley. According to Melanie Benjamin’s “Author’s Note,” all of the main features of the novel—the closeness of Capote with both Babe and Bill Paley, the Black and White Ball of 1966, and the fallout from the 1975 Esquire piece—all took place in real life. The conversations and inner monologues are inventions, but even these hew closely to textual sources. For instance, when Capote and Bill discuss Carol Marcus in Chapter 10, her full name is always interrupted by a parenthetical, making her “Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan (for she’d married Bill Saroyan twice) Matthau” (232). This is essentially how Capote introduces her in “La Côte Basque 1965,” though the Esquire piece replaces “Bill Saroyan” with “him.”

Benjamin remains faithful to the biographical facts of the lives of both Capote and Babe Paley. Truman Garcia Capote, né Truman Streckfus Persons was born in New Orleans in 1924 and died in Los Angeles in 1984. He spent most of his early childhood being raised by relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, where he befriended a young Harper Lee, who went on to become the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.