John Paul Dunphy was an American novelist and playwright, and partner of American author Truman Capote.
Early life and dance career
Dunphy was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was raised in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His sister was Gloria Dunphy. He trained in ballet under Catherine Littlefield, danced at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and toured with the George Balanchine company in South America in 1941. He married Joan McCracken, another Philadelphia dancer. They later appeared in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! in 1943, in which McCracken played Sylvie and Dunphy danced as one of the cowboys. Dunphy also danced in The Prodigal Son, a ballet performed on Broadway in conjunction with The Pirates of Penzance in 1942. Dunphy enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1944 during World War II. During his service, he published his first work, "The Life of a Carrot," in Short Story magazine.
When he met Capote in 1948, Dunphy had written John Fury, a well-received novel, and was just getting over a painful divorce from McCracken. In 1950, the two writers settled in Taormina, Sicily in a house where the author D.H. Lawrence had once lived. Ten years older than Capote, Dunphy was in many ways Capote’s opposite, as solitary as Capote was exuberantly social. Though they drifted more and more apart in the later years, the couple stayed together until Capote's death. When Capote died in 1984, his will named Dunphy as the chief beneficiary. Eight years later, Dunphy died of cancer in New York at age 77. Dunphy and Capote had separate houses in Sagaponack, New York. Following their deaths some of the money from their estates was donated to The Nature Conservancy, which used it to acquire nearby Crooked Pond on the Long Island Greenbelt between Sag Harbor, New York and Bridgehampton, New York, and their mingled ashes were scattered by the pond where a marker commemorates them. Joanne Carson, the second wife of Johnny Carson, has maintained that she also has some of Capote's ashes which she had kept at her home in Bel Air in the house where Capote died. After the ashes in California were stolen and returned, she bought a crypt for Capote's ashes at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Brentwood, California; although it is unclear if the ashes ever were deposited there. Capote dedicated his short story "One Christmas" to Jack's sister Gloria Dunphy.
John Fury is the story of an Irish working-class man who moves from a happy marriage to an unpleasant one in a life of poverty, hard work, and frustration, where his only reprisal is anger. According to the website of Ayer Company Publishers, a reprint publisher of rare and hard to find titles, Mary McGrory praised the book in The New York Times at the time of publication:
It adds up to a remarkable first novel, warm and strong, its unflinching realism saved from brutality by the author's compassion and restraint ... What Betty Smith did tenderly for Brooklyn, James T. Farrell harshly for Chicago and, most recently, Edward McSorley in his moving Our Own Kind for Providence, Dunphy does for Philadelphia.
Calmann-Lévy published a French translation in 1949, which is available at the Library of Congress. Arno Press reprinted the English version in 1976. Other Dunphy novels are Friends and Vague Lovers, Nightmovers, An Honest Woman, First Wine and its sequel, The Murderous McLaughlins,. In this book, set again in Philadelphia, c. 1917, the same narrator, at age eight, tries to get his errant father Jim to return home to his family. Dunphy also wrote Dear Genius: A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote, published by McGraw-Hill in 1987. According to the review at Amazon.com, the book is actually a novel, with the subtitle provided by the publisher; Dunphy had subtitled the manuscript more accurately A Tribute to Truman Capote.
Plays
Dunphy's plays include:
Light a Penny Candle
Saturday Night Kid, a play for two men and one woman, which opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on May 15, 1958, for a 10-day run.
The Gay Apprentice, a play for four men and five women.
Café Moon, a one-act fantasy for seven men and two women about an aging and disillusioned clerk who drinks his nights away.
Too Close for Comfort, a full-length comedy/drama for three men and one woman about a suicide-prone young man. It played for one performance at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in New York on February 19, 1960, in a double-bill as part of the American National Theater and Academy Matinee Series, along with Dunphy's The Gay Apprentice.
Squirrel, a one-act sketch for two men and one woman about a shy office clerk who likes squirrels so much he almost believes he is one. It played at the same theater as part of the ANTA series on April 10, 1962.
