In the following essay, Reed categorizes Capote's short fiction in terms of the settings of the stories.

In the following essay, Nance examines the defining characteristics of Capote's early short stories.

In the following essay, Hassan identifies the Narcissus theme as the unifying motif of Capote's work.

It is one of my intentions in this study to show that the changes in Capote's career have not been casual but are the result of a strong and highly conscious effort at growth. From the start he wrote stories which were among the best of their narrow kind, but even then he was trying to make his fiction both a source and an expression of deeper understanding, broader sympathy, greater fidelity to the reality outside his private childhood world. So far has he moved in twenty-three years of publishing t...

In the following essay, Levine perceives Capote as a writer who deftly explores “the dichotomy in the world between good and evil, the daylight and the nocturnal, man and nature, and between the internal and external manifestation of things.”

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.

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.”

In the following essay, Garson provides a thematic analysis of Capote's later work.

Inasmuch as [Truman Capote] has produced a number of works that continue to be read, studied, and discussed, he must be regarded as one of the more significant writers of the second half of this century. Undoubtedly, Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Tree of Night and Other Stories, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood, his best works, will have reader appeal for a very long time and will remain influential for other writers. Some reviewers criticized Capote's fiction prior to In Cold Blood fo...

In the following essay, originally published in 1964, Malin contends that Capote's fiction has descended from Gothic supernaturalism into camp.

Called "daylight gothic" by Mark Shorer [in his introduction to Capote's Selected Writings, "Children on Their Birthdays"] contains none of the dark gothic paraphernalia of such stories as "The Headless Hawk" or "Shut a Final Door."… Shorer describes the mood of the story as "buoyant summer rain shot through with sun," but quotes out of context: "Since Monday it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with s...

If the Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess had had a child, and the child had almost grown up, ["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] are almost the kind of short stories he could be expected to write. Reading Truman Capote's first collection is, in fact, a good deal like a trip down the rabbit hole with a metropolitanized Alice, for the fey quality which underlay Mr. Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," is here fortunately absent. In all eight stories, Mr....

Other Voices, Other Rooms is a very good novel, with an extremely simple scheme and plot which the author slowly loads with baroque and decorative details, yet without complicating it. (p. 478) Mention has been made of Poe in connection with this book of Capote's. It seems to me, however, that the points of resemblance are purely casual and are due to a similarity of subject matter rather than to conscious derivation. In certain of Poe's tales, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold-Bug and ...

["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...

[While the stories in A Tree of Night and Other Stories are] extremely well-written they are a slippery witchery collection. The usual theme seems to be pursuit—and escape. People are brought face to face and often overwhelmed by the unacknowledged desire and/or fear. When done well this is always an interesting theme. Capote matches logic with the perversely illogical. But his ideas are enshrined in technical fluency, tricks of impressionism and the like, and this makes it difficult to judge at firs...

When "The House of Flowers" is trying to be colorful there is a surplus. When it is trying to be funny or touching there is a deficiency. The characteristic originality that makes Truman Capote one of our most distinguished short-story writers seems to have been dispensed with for the purpose of writing a Jamaica travelogue that for all its visual lushness and lovely Harold Arlen music lacks a point of view. Mr. Capote, who found West Indian bordellos a pleasant place for drink and conversatio...