Is Truman Capote a Children’s Writer?

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of Truman Capote’s children’s poem “Can a Pig Fly”. Truman Capote is well-known as an author for the adult audience; however few readers are aware of the unpublished and the only known Capote’s children work written for the Random House “Beginner Books” easy-to-read series. The series was inspired by success of Theodor Geisel (also known as Doctor Seuss) children’s books. American educational circles of 1950s were under the influence of step-by-step vocabulary expansion of preschoolers and firstgraders. Hence Random House set up severe limitation for vocabulary used by new series writers. Several best-selling adult authors tried but couldn’t come up with anything worthy because they had to stick to a 100 Word List. Capote wrote several manuscripts, and “Can a Pig Fly” is the only almost finished manuscript left. American artist Hillary Knight, well-known by that time due to his works for Eloise series of books by Kay Thompson, made beautiful artworks for this unpublished picture book about the flying pig.

Keywords

• children’s literature
• truman capote
• bennett cerf
• “can a pig fly?”
• random house
• doctor seuss
• hillary knight
• harper lee