Robert Hass: 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.”

Truman Capote (center) Newton Arvin (right) and Christopher Isherwood, Nantucket, 1947.

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…