The Early Stories of Truman Capote
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A major literary event: a collection of never-before-published short stories from one of America's most beloved writers
In a small Southern town, a teenage girl anxiously waits for her date to arrive. A woman fights to save the life of a child who has her lover's eyes. Best friends on the Upper East Side discuss the theoretical murder of husbands. In these never-before-published stories, set in the rural South and the cosmopolitan New York of the 1940s, written by Truman Capote in his teens and twenties, the American master is already recognizable. This splendid collection offers readers the opportunity to see the confident first steps of one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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14 tales that Capote wrote during his teens and 20s; most of them are set in his native South, and most are previously unpublished.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.
