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Summary
Summary
The early fiction of one of the nation's most celebrated writers, Truman Capote, as he takes his first bold steps into the canon of American literature
Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood . This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capote developing the unique voice and sensibility that would make him one of the twentieth century's most original writers.
Spare yet heartfelt, these stories summon our compassion and feeling at every turn. Capote was always drawn to outsiders--women, children, African Americans, the poor--because he felt like one himself from a very early age. Here we see Capote's powers of empathy developing as he depicts his characters struggling at the margins of their known worlds. A boy experiences the violence of adulthood when he pursues an escaped convict into the woods. Petty jealousies lead to a life-altering event for a popular girl at Miss Burke's Academy for Young Ladies. In a time of extraordinary loss, a woman fights to save the life of a child who has her lover's eyes.
In these stories we see early signs of Capote's genius for creating unforgettable characters built of complexity and yearning. Young women experience the joys and pains of new love. Urbane sophisticates are worn down by cynicism. Children and adults alike seek understanding in a treacherous world. There are tales of crime and violence; of racism and injustice; of poverty and despair. And there are tales of generosity and tenderness; compassion and connection; wit and wonder. Above all there is the developing voice of a writer born in the Deep South who will use and eventually break from that tradition to become a literary figure like no other.
With a foreword by the celebrated New Yorker critic Hilton Als, this volume of early stories is essential for understanding how a boy from Monroeville, Alabama, became a legend in American literature.
Praise for The Early Stories of Truman Capote
"Succeeds at conveying the writer's youthful rawness . . . These stories capture a moment when Capote was hungry to capture the rural South, the big city, and the subtle emotions that so many around him were determined to keep unspoken." -- USA Today
"A window on the young writer's emerging voice and creativity . . . Capote's ability to conjure a time, place and mood with just a few sentences is remarkable." --Associated Press
"Blueprints of the august, confident, and delightfully acerbic writer-to-come." -- The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Dazzling." -- The Columbus Dispatch
"[These stories] stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled. . . . Breathtaking in their precocity, craftsmanship, simplicity and the tenderness [Capote] became renowned for." -- The Independent (U.K.)
"These ten-plus stories were written when Capote was a teenager and young man and will shed light on his subsequent work while remaining sharply observed pleasures in their own right." -- Library Journal
"[A] gathering of the great American prose stylist's earliest pieces, published for the first time . . . Students of both Capote and the short story will find this instructive and entertaining." -- Kirkus Reviews
Author Notes
Truman Capote, 1924 - 1984 Novelist and playwright Truman Streckfus Person was born in 1924 in New Orleans to a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen. His parents divorced when he was four years old and was then raised by relatives for a few years in Monroeville. His mother was remarried to a successful businessman, moved to New York, and Truman adopted his stepfather's surname. He attended Greenwich High School and never went to college. When he was 17, Capote's formal education ended when he was employed at The New Yorker magazine. He belived he did not need to go to college to be a writer, since he was writing seriously since age 11.
Capote's first novel was "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948), which told the story of a boy growing up in the Deep South. "The Grass Harp" (1951) is about a young boy and his elderly cousin discovering that some compromise is necessary for people to live together in a community and was adapted to screen in 1996. The play "The House of Flowers" (1954) is a musical set in a West Indies bordello. Capote then wrote, "Breakfast at Tiffanys" (1958), which tells the story of how Holly Golightly goes to New York seeking happiness. Capote became preoccupied with journalism and, sparked by the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas, began interviewing the locals to recreate the lives of the murderers and their victims. The research and writing for this novel, "In Cold Blood" (1966), took six years for him to complete.
Other works of Capote's include the classic "A Christmas Memory" (1966), which is an autobiographical account of a seven-year-old boy, his cousin, and an eccentric old lady, "Music for Chameleons" (1981), which is a collection of short pieces, interviews, stories and conversations that were published in several magazines, and "One Christmas" (1982).
On August 26, 1984 in Los Angeles, Truman Capote died of liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. Published after his death were "Conversations With Capote" (1985) and "Answered Prayers: The Untitled Novel" (1986).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This volume collects 14 tales that Capote wrote during his teens and 20s; most of them are set in his native South, and most are previously unpublished. At their underwhelming best, they reveal his adept ear for Southern vernacular and make a good attempt at atmosphere, though suffering from adjectival overkill. Early on, Capote's imagination conjured Southern gothic dramas. An escaped convict with "cold, calculating, insane eyes" pleads for help in "The Moth in the Flame." "Miss Belle Rankin," considered "a witch," is a starving old woman who dies under a japonica tree she refused to sell. The stories are earnest but predictable efforts. And though Capote was adept at posing imaginative scenarios, he seems incapable of producing satisfying endings. Thin characterization and inept narrative development in "Swamp Terror" (two boys get lost in a swamp while an escaped convict is on the loose) and in "Kindred Spirits" (two society matrons plan murder) mark them as puerile efforts. "If I Forget You," a sentimental story about a girl in love with a man who is leaving town is a vignette without depth, and another, "This Is in Jamie," a would-be tearjerker in which a little boy receives the dog he desires from a dead child's father, falls flat. "Traffic West" is a facile version of the novella The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a story popular during Capote's youth. These stories will be of interest mainly as a budding writer's efforts to master the techniques of his craft. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Gathering of the great American prose stylist's earliest pieces, published for the first time. Some of those pieces are very far from Park Avenue. In the first, a teenage Capote (Summer Crossing, 2005, etc.) serves up an odd vignette concerning a young hobo and his older, wizened friend of the road. "Ma an' them don't know I been bummin' around the country for the last two years; they think I'm a traveling salesman," the youngster says, just before the older man helps himself to a ten-spot his companion has been guarding against the day that he can wash up, buy a suit, and head home. The moment of their parting is worthy of de Maupassant. So it is, too, when Capote, Alabaman by upbringing if not inclination, turns in another Southern-fried piece, this one involving a gaggle of kids, a snakebite, and a chicken or three. "The ulcers were burning like mad from the poison," Capote writes in a fine closing, "and she felt sick all over when she thought of what she had done." Capote might have become another Flannery O'Connor had he stuck to his home turf, but instead he relocated to New York, and several of the later stories here reflect that change of venue. Now his characters are more urbane and decidedly more privileged: "The girl had had excellent letters from the Petite Ecole in France and the Mantone Academy in Switzerland." Excellent letters or no, the story in question marks what will become a typical Capote ploy, a scenario of roiling jealousies and intrigue under a superficially calm cover. Another reveals Capote's trademark strangeness, too: "It's one thing to lose a leg," harrumphs one character, "but it's too much to lose an election because of someone else's stupidity." Amputations, petty larceny, and noblesse oblige: it's all of a piece, and all that's missing are the chameleons. Students of both Capote and the short story will find this instructive and entertainingand, if somewhat unformed still, very readable all the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
"The Early Stories of Truman Capote" isn't Capote at his best - nor does one expect it to be. This collection of juvenilia, written when he was in his teens and early 20s, is marred by melodrama, cliché and sentimentality, not to mention unrealized characters. But there are signs of what would make Capote the writer who would go on to produce "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The settings of these 14 stories, discovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, are the South and New York; the fascination is with those on the margins. As Hilton Als notes in his foreword, "Capote, the spiritual waif as a child with no real fixed address, found his focus, or perhaps, mission: to articulate all that which his circumstances and society had hitherto not described, especially transience, and those moments of heterosexual love or closeted, silent homoeroticism, that sealed people off, one from the other." Even in his youth, Capote had an observing eye and a listening ear, a precocious ability to use snatches of gossip, stray facts and little details to powerful effect. "One day she had gone fishing at the pond but all she had caught were a couple of skinny, bony catfish and two moccasins," he writes of a country shopkeeper in "The Mill Store." "How she had screamed when she pulled the snakes up, twisting, flashing their slimy bodies in the sun, their poisonous, cotton mouths sunk into her hook. After the second one, she had dropped her pole and line, rushed back to the store and spent the rest of the humid day consoling herself with movie magazines and a bottle of bourbon." The lines about the snakes are nice - but the movie magazines and the bourbon are what earn the story its arresting ending.
