["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] contains one extraordinarily good story plus three or four others less good but still memorable that should help redeem Truman Capote, the writer, from that other Capote, the creature of the advertising department and the photographer…. The boy author has been a standard feature of our literature ever since the beginnings of romanticism, and I suppose our generation is entitled to one of its own, but surely Capote deserves better than being fixed in that stereotype.

True, his work shows the occasional overwriting, the twilit Gothic subject matter, and the masochistic uses of horror traditional in the fiction of the boy author …, but Capote has, in addition, an ability to control tone, an honest tenderness toward those of his characters he can understand (children and psychotics), and a splendid sense of humor—seldom remarked upon. In the best of his stories...