Truman Capote drew on his own youthful experience in rural Alabama to write "A Christmas Memory." This story, which he called his personal favorite, is an idealized recollection of one of the few relatively secure periods of his unstable early childhood.

Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Although his parents did not formally divorce until he was seven years old, they never created a stable home for young Truman, and some of his earliest memories are of accompanying his mother, Lillie Mae, on job-hunting excursions to St. Louis, Missouri, and Louisville, Kentucky. At other times he was shuttled between the homes of various relatives in Alabama. One of these households of his mother's relatives provided the settings for much of his early fiction, including "A Christmas Memory."

In 1930, Capote was sent to live in Monroeville, Alabama, while his mother went...