SOURCE: “Tiger Lilies,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1948, pp. 516–18.

In the following review of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Young asserts that Capote exhibits “the aura of individuality, of personality, a special atmosphere of thought and style, an attitude toward reality apart from any merely practical problem, character, or situation.”

The large number of novels, even when well written, bear no qualifications of individuality. Except as to subject matter, one can scarcely be singled out from another. Other Voices, Other Rooms, the first novel by the young Southerner Truman Capote, does bear, in the writing itself, the aura of individuality, of personality, a special atmosphere of thought and style, an attitude toward reality apart from any merely practical problem, character, or situation. This work, like the short stories, is concerned with the extra-marginal, the symbols interloping among otherwise unintelligible experiences, the dreams, memories, perceptions, the fleeting peculiarities of...