It is one of my intentions in this study to show that the changes in Capote's career have not been casual but are the result of a strong and highly conscious effort at growth. From the start he wrote stories which were among the best of their narrow kind, but even then he was trying to make his fiction both a source and an expression of deeper understanding, broader sympathy, greater fidelity to the reality outside his private childhood world. So far has he moved in twenty-three years of publishing that one is tempted to identify at least two distinct Truman Capotes. There is, of course, only one: In Cold Blood retains deep traces of the earliest stories, and the intellectual toughness so evident in the nonfiction novel was really there all the time. (p. 11)

Some knowledge of Capote's early life is essential to an understanding of his...