Truman Capote’s Early Short Stories or The Fight of a Writer to Find His Own Voice

Abstract

[Abstract] Truman Capote’s early stories have not been studied in depth so far and literary studies on Truman Capote’s short stories start with his first collection “A Tree of Night and Other Stories”, published in 1949. Stories previous to 1945 such as “The Walls Are Cold”, “A Mink’s of One’s Own” or “The Shape of things” are basically to be discovered and their relevance lie on the fact of being successful narrative exercises that focus more in the construction of characters than in the action itself. They are stories to be read “on one sitting” and stories that make the reader foresee Capote’s skilful short narrative in the future. It is our aim, then, in this paper to present the first three ever written stories by Truman Capote, to analyse them and to remark their relevance for Capote’s literary universe.