With a Foreword by the celebratedNew Yorkercritic Hilton Als, this volume of early stories is essential for understanding how a boy from Monroeville, Alabama, became a legend in American letters. A major literary event- a collection of never-before-published short stories from one of America's most beloved writers In a small Southern town, a teenage girl anxiously waits for her date to arrive. A woman fights to save the life of a child who has her lover's eyes. Best friends on the Upper East Side discuss the theoretical murder of husbands. In these never-before-published stories, set in the rural South and the cosmopolitan New York of the 1940s, written by Truman Capote in his teens and twenties, the American master is already recognizable. This splendid collection offers readers the opportunity to see the confident first steps of one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers.