The Early Stories of Truman Capote

The first stories of an American icon, and one of the most popular and beloved writers in Penguin Modern Classics.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 murder of husbands. In these 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 collection allows readers to see the confident first steps of one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1965), which immediately became the centre of a storm of controversy on its publication, Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986), all of which are published by Penguin. Truman Capote died in August 1984.

'She was very happy here, with the wind blowing in her hair and Death around the corner' Written when Truman Capote was in his teens and twenties, these recently-discovered short stories give a rare insight into an American icon. Tales of disappointed lovers, ageing spinsters, hoboes and murderous housewives, of yearning, poverty, despair, compassion, wit and wonder, they show us the boy from Alabama who became one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary voices. 'Breathtaking ... The stories are special. They stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled' Andrew Johnson, Independent 'An intriguing glimpse of Capote as a boy: precocious, provocative, spirited and strange, a "pocket Merlin" spinning tall tales' Olivia Laing, New Statesman

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