Jack Dunphy

John Paul Dunphy (August 22, 1914 – April 26, 1992) was an American novelist and playwright. He was widely known as the partner of author Truman Capote.

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 writer Truman Capote in 1948, Dunphy had written John Fury, a well-received novel, and was just getting over a painful divorce from McCracken. Ten years older than Capote, Dunphy was in many ways Capote's opposite, as solitary as Capote was exuberantly social.

In 1950, the two writers settled in Taormina, Sicily, in a house where the writer D. H. Lawrence had once lived. Capote dedicated his short story "One Christmas" to Jack's sister, Gloria Dunphy. The couple drifted more and more apart in the later years and their relationship turned platonic after Truman's story "La Côte Basque, 1965" was published in Esquire magazine in 1975. They remained close friends and when Capote died in 1984, his will named Dunphy as the chief beneficiary.

In 1987, Dunphy published a memoir, titled Dear Genius: My Life with Truman Capote, which details their relationship. He wrote: "Truman and I were never together-together people as most couples are. Such proximity would have killed us. We were always dreaming away from wherever we were, thus repeating the pattern that had commenced in childhood, when one's need to escape from one's own kind was so savage, so burning in its intensity, that had either of us stayed home, he would certainly have perished."

In 1992, 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, maintained that she also had some of Capote's ashes (a claim Dunphy denied), which she had kept at her home in Bel Air, where Capote died. After those ashes were stolen and then returned, she bought a crypt for them at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, although it is unclear whether the ashes were ever deposited there. Carson died in 2015.