Truman Capote’s First Love
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Hass on why Capote named his literary criticism award for Newton Arvin—the man he called “my Harvard.”
I couldn’t be more honored to have Robert Hass, whom my wife and I first met in 2009 over a wonderful dinner in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, as the author of the first TFP guest essay for 2025. As I wrote in the TFP introduction to that conversation, that evening was a joyous and healing experience for my wife and me. Hass was “charming, almost boyishly so, and more excited about my wife and her gifts as a chef and ceramicist than my questions.” Over the years, I maintained contact with him, writing to him and his lovely wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, sporadically. The next time I saw Hass was in 2018 when he’d come to the University of Iowa, where I was teaching journalism, to accept the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin for his brilliant essays in A Little Book on Form. Hass, to his credit, said next to nothing about the book and his own writing. Instead, t…
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