There is pleasure in reporting how very fine [The Grass Harp] is, how admirably and even brilliantly accomplished—instinct with vitality and humor and a tenderness which never curdles into sentimentality. One's pleasure in this case has little to do with literary actualities: it rises, rather, from satisfaction at the confirmation of a talent….

The Grass Harp represents [Capote's] first serious experiment in major fiction. (p. 73)

Within the slim compass of this work, Truman Capote has achieved a masterpiece of passionate simplicity, of direct, intuitive observation. Without any loss of intensity, he has purified the clotted prose of Other Voices, Other Rooms, producing a luminous reflector for his unique visual sensibility…. But the real wonder of The Grass Harp—the major advance over the earlier novel—is revealed in its awareness of a larger reality. Capote has sunk a shaft more deeply into human experience, and his vision...