SOURCE: “Surprised by Joy: Stories of the Fifties and Sixties,” in Truman Capote, Frederick Ungar, 1980, pp. 91–110.

In the following essay, Garson describes the plots and major thematic concerns of four of Capote's short stories and a novella published in the 1950s and 1960s.

The story “A Diamond Guitar,” which appeared first in Harper's Bazaar in 1950, was reprinted in the collection Capote called Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Short Stories, in 1958. Also included in the group were “A House of Flowers” (1951) and “A Christmas Memory” (1956), both of which had been published in Mademoiselle. The story, “Among the Paths to Eden” (1960), printed originally in Esquire, is in Selected Writings (1963), which also contains a reissue of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

“A Diamond Guitar” reveals Capote's early interest in prison stories as well as his sympathy towards certain kinds of convicts. The same empathy exists in the book In Cold...