6 David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture won the Pulitzer Prize; Justin Kaplan’s biography of Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, won the National Book Award.
7 Maloff had good reason to regret the day that he became a literary judge. A few weeks later James Michener, one of Truman’s admirers, wrote a letter to Book World professing to rebuke Truman for his ill-tempered attack, but in fact taking a second swipe at Maloff: “Granted that Mr. Maloff’s novel was one of the most pathetic offerings in recent years, granted that it was a polished up re-working of some deep-think college essays remembered from Freshman English 3, and granted that Mr. Capote was right in describing the novel as a pompous travesty on popular prototypes, there was still no reason to abuse Mr. Maloff personally. He deserves compassion rather than ridicule.”
8 “Ah woe!… For what woe lacketh here? My children lost, my land, my lord.”
9 Danny was Truman’s private name for him; it was not his real name.
10 Truman’s instinct to leave was correct: the proceedings dragged on for six years. The young defendant was twice convicted and twice sentenced to 594 years in prison.
11 His salary was ten thousand dollars a week plus expenses; by the time he finished, he had earned nearly seventy-nine thousand dollars.
12 He had removed “Mojave,” which he had originally projected as the novel’s second chapter.
13 Truman was not the only man Lee discarded that spring. In early May she had left her fiancé, San Francisco hotelier Newton Cope, standing—quite literally—at the altar, even as the wedding guests were assembling and the champagne was cooling in the ice buckets. Speaking of Cope and another ex-boyfriend, Peter Tufo, she said: “Why, no one would have ever heard of either of them if it hadn’t been for me.”
14Jim Fosburgh died in April, 1978. Minnie followed in November, leaving Truman some mementos, a painting of a cat and a pair of pottery rabbits, which seemed to indicate that at least one of the three Cushing sisters had forgiven him.
15 He was to receive another fifty thousand dollars when filming began, together with a percentage of possible profits at the box office.
16 Though collections of stories rarely do well, Music for Chameleons was a happy exception; it surprised Random House by selling 84,471 copies and remaining on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for sixteen weeks, from August 31 through December 21, 1980.
17 After Truman died, Tiny offered for sale an awkward and lumpish story, “I Remember Grandpa,” that she said he had written in 1947, the year he was completing Other Voices. She submitted no evidence to support her claim that he was the author, however—the manuscript was typed without any notations in his handwriting—and he obviously was not. Redbook printed it nonetheless, an Atlanta publisher brought it out as a book, complete with illustrations, and many readers undoubtedly assumed that it was genuine.
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