Collected Stories of Truman Capote (Modern Library) [Hardcover]

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

It has been just over twenty years since Truman Capote --- the controversial and tiny, child-voiced man of a mega-writer who needs no introduction --- left this life, yet his work still resonates with the deadly Southern charm of making love to a sexy stranger during a sudden summer downpour.

A reader must make his or her own way in these lonely Alabama and Louisiana evenings, accompanied by diamond guitars, lost ladies, circus freaks, childhood bullies, soda shops, society types, emerging sexualities, bad parents, great Christmases, train rides, fearful hidings, fatal romances, poverty, big city scams, eccentric artists, identity issues, and the broken American dreams that populate the twenty eerie stories in this collection.

It is in the early autobiographical stories, published in ladies' magazines between 1943 and 1956, when Capote was first flexing his muscles as a fiction and journalistic talent, which offer an inspirational yet heartbreaking glance into the author's early years. From rural Mobile to spectacular New York, Capote repeatedly employs the devices of the weathered mink that must be sold, the beautiful guitar that calms the savages, the alluring yet dangerous stranger, and, most importantly, the creative prison every artist endures at the hands of a planet mismanaged by religion, accountants, gossip, brutes and thieves.

It is the realization of imprisonment without parole or escape --- a theme the author would lustfully follow until his greatest nonfiction success, IN COLD BLOOD, and his greatest failure, addiction to fame and drugs --- that Capote most poignantly explored in his pre-diva years. It was a hungry, optimistic young writer headed for New York who created "The Shape of Things," "Miriam," "My Side of the Matter," "Preacher's Legend," "The Headless Hawk," "Master Misery" and "A Diamond Guitar."

In "The Shape of Things," from 1944, two women and a soldier on a train are the polite captives of a second, disheveled, drunk-appearing soldier who is headed home after wartime experience and the unmentionable shellshock. Meanwhile, the title character of Miriam enters a widow's house and mind, and refuses to leave. In "My Side of the Matter," from 1945, a narrator resembling Capote himself becomes a prisoner to a wife and her family. "Master Misery" steals and imprisons the dreams of fragile New York émigrés. Preacher, an old Southern black man, becomes a prisoner in his own home at the mercy of two hunters appearing as saints. The diamond guitar is the showpiece of a man in prison.

In addition to the savagely bared souls of each character, it is the richness of the musical writing that seduces and even teaches: "In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in the garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler's bell."

Up to the final story from 1982, the invisible prison theme is carried through most tales in the collection, yet is untouched by Reynolds Price, the respected Southern author who provides an all-too-brief introduction (just six pages [with one that includes Price's half-page biography], which fail to mention several of the most important stories) to this volume. Price irresponsibly laments, "America has never been a land of readers," a trite complaint embraced by a publishing world that always forgets the country has more readers, libraries, bookstores, and Internet book sales than nearly any other on earth.

Also, much to the chagrin of any dedicated bibliophile, missing is a list of where these stories first appeared; instead there is a useless list of copyright dates. To remedy the problems, readers are advised to seek OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS, Capote's first novel, as well as CAPOTE by Gerald Clarke and TRUMAN CAPOTE by George Plimpton, both fine and revealing biographies of the writer.

While later editions of this startling and romantic must-have collection could be smartly pared of Price's seemingly dashed-off-at-the-last-minute introduction (he actually compares Hemingway's fame to Capote's), and enhanced by proper publishing credits, this book serves as, to today's literary marketplace, the unseen Capote --- a number of beautiful stories published decades before Capote was at his best, an exciting introduction to a career unmatched in talent and literary impact.

--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney

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.