Understanding Truman Capote

two boys: pimple-faced, grinning, they loomed in the dusk like menacing flames, and Sylvia, passing them, felt a burning all through her, quite as though she’d brushed fire. They turned and followed her past a deserted playground, one of them bump-bumping a stick along an iron fence, the other whistling

Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948

Rosie the Riveter

These questions inspired feelings of guilt and encouraged many Americans to seek an escape from this oppressive past.

In the absence of accepted moral and ethical principles of conduct and belief, an infinity of actions and beliefs became possible and the anxiety of choice unavoidable. For instance, consumer anxiety was experienced in a marketplace stocked with virtually indistinguishable goods, each bearing a brand name and claiming superiority over all others” (104). It seemed that Americans were exchanging one set of anxieties for another

In the absence of accepted moral and ethical principles of conduct and belief, an infinity of actions and beliefs became possible and the anxiety of choice unavoidable. For instance, consumer anxiety was experienced in

the global economy.

Although isolationism gradually became a political and economic impossibility, it did manifest itself culturally in a new emphasis on the individual

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, killing 2,403 people, the illusion of political isolationism in America ended

At the end of the 1930s, isolationism appealed to a country that was still reeling from the hardships of an economic depression at home

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 World War II, from the terrifying implications of the atomic age, and from dramatic social changes at home. Ultimately A Tree of Night and Other Stories depicts this disconcerting unease and portrays isolation (through turning inward and nostalgia) as dangerous for the individual and the country