One hot summer night in 1945, three young American writers, each an enfant terrible, came together in a stuffy Manhattan apartment for the first time. Each member of this pink triangle was on the dawn of world fame—Tennessee Williams for A Streetcar Named Desire; Gore Vidal for his notorious homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar; and Truman Capote for Other Voices, Other Rooms— a book that had been marketed with a photograph depicting Capote as a under aged sex object that caused as much controversy as the prose inside. 

From that summer night emerged betrayals that eventually evolved into lawsuits, stolen lovers, public insults, and the most famous and flamboyant rivalries in America’s literary history. The private opinions of these authors about their celebrity acquaintances usually left scar tissue.