Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)

Other Voices, Other Rooms

First edition hardback
Author	Truman Capote
Country	United State
Language	English
Genre	Southern Gothic Bildungsroman Gay novel
Publisher	Random House
Publication date	January 1948
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	231 pp
OCLC	3737623

Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel by Truman Capote. It is written in the Southern Gothic style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.

Other Voices, Other Rooms is significant because it is both Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical. It is also noteworthy due to its erotically charged photograph of the author, risque content, and debut at number nine on The New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for nine weeks.

Truman Capote began writing the manuscript for Other Voices, Other Rooms after being inspired by a walk in the woods while he was living in Monroeville, Alabama. He immediately cast aside his rough manuscript for Summer Crossing and took up writing Other Voices, Other Rooms. After leaving Alabama, he continued to work on the manuscript in New Orleans, Louisiana. His budding literary fame put him in touch with fellow southerner and writer Carson McCullers. Capote joined McCullers at the artists' community, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York to continue working on his novel. As friends, McCullers helped Capote locate an agent and a publisher (Marion Ives and Random House) for Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote continued to work on the novel in North Carolina and eventually completed it in a rented cottage in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Truman Capote took two years to write Other Voices, Other Rooms.

The story focuses on the lonely and slightly effeminate 13-year-old boy Joel Harrison Knox following the death of his mother. Joel is sent from New Orleans, Louisiana to live with his father who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion on an isolated plantation in Mississippi, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, his cousin Randolph, a gay man and dandy, the defiant tomboy Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend, and Jesus and Zoo, the two Black caretakers of the home. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remain a mystery. When he finally is allowed to see his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being inadvertently shot by Randolph and nearly dying. Joel runs away with Idabel to a carnival and meets a woman with dwarfism; on a Ferris Wheel, the woman attempts to touch Joel in a sexual manner and is refuted. Looking for Idabel in a storm, Joel catches pneumonia and eventually returns to the Landing where he is nursed back to health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph is that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window is actually Randolph, dressed in an old Mardi Gras costume.