BIB_ID
324771
Accession number
MA 7959
Creator
Capote, Truman, 1924-1984.
Display Date
undated [1934-35].
Credit line
Purchased on the Drue Heinz Fund, 2012.
Description
1 item (27 p.) ; 27.7 cm.
Notes
Written in pencil, on lined leaves, rectos only. Numerous grammatical and spelling errors, with erasures and corrections throughout.
Provenance
Purchased on the Drue Heinz Fund, 2012.
Summary
This is one of the few surviving examples of Capote's earliest forays into writing. The biographer Gerald Clarke notes that "those few -- sixteen themes, stories, and poems -- were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford" (Capote: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988; p. 50). "Christmas Vacation" is divided into five chapters ("Christmas Guest"; "The Uninvited Guests"; "Uncle William Makes Trouble"; "The Kids Make Trouble"; "The Hoodlums Leave") and features a raucous, lively cast of characters. "Christmas Vacation" has been called "by far the most significant and substantial of [Capote's] childhood literary efforts" (Bradford Morrow 139; introductory essay to facsimile publication in Conjunctions: 31 Radical Shadows, Fall 1998; pp. 139-77). The story features Mrs. Busybody, a "fat old widow" and "public nuisance," and her foils, a group of unruly neighborhood children, and the family of seven who arrive uninvited to stay with her for the Christmas holiday. Amidst a slapstick array of flying china, whiskey drinking, and fist fights, the disastrous visit of Uncle William, Lulu Belle, and their children unfolds as old Mrs. Busybody comically perseveres. Capote later moved from Monroeville to New York and this story, re-titled "Christmas Vacation," was submitted for a school assignment while he was a sixth-grade student at Trinity School in Manhattan.
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