The first stories of an American icon, and one of the most popular and beloved writers in Penguin Modern Classics.

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 murder of husbands. In these 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 collection allows readers to see the confident first steps of one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed writers.