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.