429. TRUMAN CAPOTE’S A TREE OF NIGHT AND OTHER STORIES AND THE GRASS HARP: GOTHIC HORRORS AND MODERN FAIRY TALES

Thomas Fahy via Zoom   Truman Capote’s debut collection of short fiction, A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), portrays the decade of the 1940s as torn between security and fear, communal engagement and isolationism, public and private identity. The end of World War II produced a sense of relief, but almost immediately the country seemed to face even greater threats with the global spread of Communism and the realities of the atomic age. Capote captures this climate of uncertainty through fragmented characters who have withdrawn from others in an attempt to escape both the dangers of modern life and a history (personal and social) that they don’t wish to confront. They hope isolation will protect them from present-day threats and past failures, but the act of turning inward only exacerbates their fears. Capote uses these anxieties as metaphors for the tensions characterizing contemporary American culture, which longed to retreat from its global responsibilities as a result of Worl