Review: “The Early Stories”

Truman Capote’s collection of never-before-published short stories mixes everything from petty jealousies to the blinding violence of adulthood.

Brief, terse stories from Capote as an adolescent and young man writing his way through racism and injustice, poverty and loss.

Young people lost in daydreams. Older folks lost in life, wandering to their fates and unintended ends. Death hovers around every corner, every turn of the page.

One story in particular, “Traffic West” pits four business executives, the mayor of a small town, a man who escapes suicide through love and a young black maid who decides to return to the south from the greatest metropolis on earth in a bus that slams into an oncoming truck and kills everyone on board.

It reads like an elegy for America.

And Truman Capote.