CAPOTE A Biography <i> by Gerald Clarke (Ballantine Books: $12.95) </i>

Gerald Clarke spent nearly nine years interviewing and recording Truman Capote. He spoke as well to nearly everyone who knew the man, and he had exclusive access to Capote’s unpublished letters and segments of Capote’s unpublished writings and notes.

Capote’s life had a less-than-auspicious start: His parents’ honeymoon “skidded to a halt” when his father, Arch Persons, ran out of money and put his bride, Lillie Mae, on a train and sent her home to Monroeville, Ala. As the marriage also skidded to a halt, Lillie Mae discovered that she was pregnant and, though determined to have an abortion, was unable to do so.

Truman was reared largely by Lillie Mae’s cousins, three middle-aged sisters.

Capote worked as a copyboy at The New Yorker, and his earliest dream was to be published there, but he was ultimately fired (he inadvertently insulted Robert Frost). Instead his first works were published in women’s magazines: Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle.

Thus a meteoric career was launched and propelled itself through American and European high society, until it finally sputtered out in dissolution, alcoholism and despair.

“Capote’s last years ran out in a chaos of alcohol, drugs and scabrous scenes with a series of lovers,” Richard Eder wrote in these pages. “Clarke’s detail throughout is prodigious.”