In ”Music for Chameleons,” a collection of short nonfiction pieces published in 1980, Mr. Capote, in a ”self-interview,” asked himself whether, at that point in his life, God had helped him. His answer: ”Yes. More and more. But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint.”

Mr. Capote’s mother, who eventually committed suicide, liked to be called Nina and was not, according to her own testimony as well as her son’s, temperamentally suited to motherhood. Living with her husband in a New Orleans hotel, she sent Truman to live with relatives in Monroeville when he was barely able to walk, and for the first nine years of his life he lived mostly in Alabama under the supervision of female cousins and aunts.

In that period, he said years later, he felt like ”a spiritual orphan, like a turtle on its back.”

Most summers the boy returned to New Orleans for a month or so, and accompanied his father on trips up and down the Mississippi aboard the riverboat on which Mr. Persons worked as a purser. Truman learned to tap dance, he said, and was proud of the fact that he once danced for the passengers accompanied by Louis Armstrong, whose band was playing on the steamboat.

Many of his stories, notably ”A Christmas Memory,” which paid loving tribute to his old cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who succored him in his childhood loneliness, were based on his recollections of life in and around Monroeville. So were his first published novel, ”Other Voices, Other Rooms,” his second, ”The Grass Harp,” and the collection of stories, ”A Tree of Night.”