The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

Before he wrote "In Cold Blood" and became the darling of the New York Set, Truman was writing short stories down in Alabama. And they were good - very good. He also wrote a little booklet about Christmas traditions in the South and it was charming. Before Truman morphed into this "thing", he was an very important up and comer. This set of stories proves that. Truman had a way of describing characters that made you instantly love them, or instantly detest them. Yes, he was a delicate fay little thing, but his writing shines through all of that. Read this book.

Truman Capote was a brilliant, eccentric novelist and author of a shocking at the time of its publication, documentary fiction book "In Cold Blood". And although he is famous for these works, his short stories are equally captivating and original. They are small masterpieces, weird and magnetizing. The protagonists are usually strange children (in his other works, Capote did not pay much attention to children), fascinating and different than adults, with their own world, dreams and agendas, or alienated, nerdish, unhappy adults, losers, who also have much of a child in them. Some of the protagonists are said to be modeled on the real people the author met during the course of his life, but some can be only attributed to his imagination... The world in the stories is only semi-realistic, like a dream, everything is wrapped in a fog of uncertainty. My favorite stories are " Children On Their Birthdays" (the longest of the stories, I think, and very well structured) where the life of a certain Miss Bobbitt, a girl of extraordinary discipline and set life goals, is abruptly ended by the afternoon bus; "Miriam" (which won The O'Henry Prize), where an elderly lady enters into a nightmare, after meeting at the cinema an angelic-looking little girl-demon, not to be able to get rid of her again (actually cost me some sleepless nights...); "Master Misery" about a mysterious New York City man, who buys people's dreams and a girl who gets addicted to dream-selling; and "A Tree of Night", about a dreary encounter on the train. The stories are spooky, but if analyzed, the events recalled may not have anything strange in them to the outside observer; yet the interpretation and way in which they are told suggest otherwise. These short stories show the other side of Capote's fiction and are a great round-up for anyone who wants to know his works thoroughly.

All summer I have been trying to find a piece of work that was not full of trash. I didn't want some lusty romantic novel or a book with guns and bombs going off with every page I turned. I wanted something different. Something clever and ingenious. Capote's short stories are eccentric and intelligent. I definitely reccomend this book to finish off the summer.

This volume contains the nineteen stories that Truman Capote published, plus "The Bargain", a story never before published. Reynolds Price, in his introduction, states that Hemingway and Capote are the ". . . only two writers of distinguished fiction . . . to become American household names." The comparisons with Hemingway go further, I think, than that. Both writers produced their best work by age forty or so, and both, at that point, exhibited increasingly bizarre and self-destructive behavior, becoming celebrities more than writers. Capote was forty when he published In Cold Blood in 1965, and he produced very little work at all after that. Only three of the stories here were written after 1960. So we have seventeen stories dated from 1943, when Capote was eighteen or nineteen, to 1960, plus three later stories. As Price notes, several of the earlier stories betray the influence of his earlier contemporaries and fellow southerners Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Yet even in many of these, Capote's voice is his own. "Children on Their Birthdays", for example, is a marvelous story. Taken as a whole, this collection is a reminder of what a great writer Capote was and what a tragedy it was that his muse abandoned him so early.

Let's face it: Truman Capote was his own worst enemy. He started out in the dumps, with a mother who didn't love him and a huckster father who wound up in jail. Nice role models. Abandoned, raised by various cousins in the South, fought over by his two repugnant parents, he ultimately found himself in Greenwich, Connecticut with his "loving" mother and stepfather. His mother apparently was horrified by Truman's runtlike appearance and effeminate manners and never missed a chance to abuse the hell out of him. With that template of self-hatred embedded in his soul, he was headed on a path of compensating self-aggrandisement and inevitable self-destruction. All that said, the man could tell a tale, and exquisitely. He was full of talent, and it comes storming out in some of these wonderful early stories such as "Jug of Silver," "My Side of the Matter," "A Tree of Night," "House of Flowers," and "A Christmas Memory." The wonderful "The Grass Harp" is also a miracle in brilliant writing, which he completed at age 26 and is foreshadowed in some of this early work, as is "Breakfast at Tiffany's." I would mislead you if I didn't mention that some of the stories here are obviously not so great imitations of Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. You'd miss out on some wonderful stuff if you did. Too much has been written about Capote's "wasted" life and early promise not being fulfilled. I don't know about that. He wrote quite a bit. I say let's celebrate what he gave us, through his masked suffering and pain, and let's dwell on the fineness of his artistry and his superb entertainments, in plain view in this collection. Of course, Random House succeeds again in producing a lovely book, the type highly readable and the look and feel inviting. This is a winner.

I believe a lot of people have forgotten or don't know that Truman Capote, in addition to being a brilliant novelist, was a gifted short story writer. I still remember when I read "Miriam" in my junior high school literature book. Later, I started reading all of Capote's stories and I eventually stumbled upon my all time favorite short story (of any writer) - "Children on Their Birthdays" ("Yesterday afternoon the six-o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit.") "A Christmas Memory" is another all time favorite and one of the most touching stories I've ever read. Capote was a master at using the English language - his words are simple, elegant, beautiful and most memorable. All of Capote's stories are collected here for the first time, the year that Capote would have turned 80. The stories are: The Walls Are Cold A Mink of One's Own The Shape of Things Jug of Silver Miriam My Side of the Matter Preacher's Legend A Tree of Night The Headless Hawk Shut a Final Door Children on Their Birthdays Master Misery The Bargain (never before published) A Diamond Guitar House of Flowers A Christmas Memory Among the Paths to Eden The Thanksgiving Visitor Mojave One Christmas