SOURCE: “The Room Was Locked, with the Key on the Inside: Female Influence in Truman Capote's ‘My Side of the Matter,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1987, pp. 279–88.

In the following essay, Allmendinger detects the influence of Eudora Welty's “Why I Live at the P.O.” on Capote's “My Side of the Matter.”

Grobel: “Has any American writer had an influence on you as a writer?”

Capote: “No American writer has.”

—Conversations with Capote

I

The apartment was in the wildest disorder—the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled with blood, and seeming to have been pulled out...