The Complete Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote. Random House, 2004. $24.95 — 320 pp.

Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of Appalachia by Stephen Kirk. John F. Blair, 2004. $21.95 — 248 pp.

Most of us remember him, I suspect, in the last stages of his life, that ugly time when he began appearing on late-night television in a white suit, a short, plump man, drugged or drunken much of the time, creepy, humorous, and observant, dabbing at his eyes and demolishing reputations in that shrill, whining voice. In Cold Blood, his story of random murder in which he single-handedly created the genre of true crime writing, was behind him by this time; he was working, he said, on Answered Prayers, a novel that would examine the lives of New York’s rich and famous. When a long portion of the novel appeared in Esquire, his wealthy Manhattan friends cut him from their circle, and he died in 1984, a victim of drugs, alcohol, and his own lifelong obsession with the rich and famous.

Born Truman Streckfus Parsons in New Orleans in 1924, he later took the last name, Capote, of his mother’s second husband. Shunted around in his early years from relative to relative, he later moved to New York, where by the age of 19 he was beginning what seemed a brilliant career as a writer of stories and novels. He would eventually lose his early talent, squandering it on film projects, on second-rate nonfiction, and on living life among the upper classes.

Random House Publishers has done both Truman Capote and the rest of us a great literary service with its publication of The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. There he stands on the front jacket of the book, wearing a T-shirt, a young man with large eyes and a frog-like mouth. Capote was never handsome — on those late-night shows he occasionally looked like Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad — but he developed from an early age an allure that drew others to him, particularly men of his same sexual bent or women with money.

In these collected stories we see Capote focusing on these and other themes important to him. In “Children On Their Birthdays,” which I read for the first time in this collection and which is now a story that will stay with me forever, Capote gives us Miss Lily Jane Bobbit from Memphis, who is one of the oddest, funniest, and most interesting characters in modern American fiction. Knowing what we do of Capote’s own life, we can see the author, who wrote this story at the age of 24, come alive in the form of this weird 10-year-old girl.

Here, too, is the often-anthologized “Miriam,” another story of a willful, strange girl who invades the apartment and then the life of an older woman. Here is “A Christmas Memory,” which we reviewed in this column for the holidays, and its counterpart, “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” In these stories and in many of the others, we see Capote giving us some of the best American writing about children and the elderly of the last 60 years.

In the first story of the collection, “The Walls Are Cold,” and in “Mojave,” which was written 30 years later, we see Capote casting a cold eye on the rich and how they live. “The Walls Are Cold” tells of a youthful New York party hostess who was “... very young and small and perfect. Her face was pale and framed with sleek black hair, and her lipstick was a trifle too dark.” She entices a Southern sailor into her bedroom, encourages his advances, and then slaps him, savagely calling him “Dirt” before having him ejected from the party. In “Mojave,” we might nearly be looking at the girl 15 or 20 years later, grown now, married to wealth, unable to love her own children, yet loving her husband to the point of arranging mistresses for him because she herself can no longer bear his physicality. It is an odd story about money and what money can buy, about power and wealth and the sickness that often attends the worship of their accumulation.

Many years ago, I went through two Truman Capote novels: Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I remember liking the latter enough to avoid seeing the movie, despite the presence of the lovely Audrey Hepburn. Reading these stories brought back those memories of Capote’s longer fictions and made me remember why the rest of the world frequently regards the short story as a worthy American achievement.

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Stephen Kirk’s Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of Appalachia is an entertaining, informative look at various authors who have lived in Western North Carolina, particularly in Asheville, writers who range from the famous to the obscure.

The famous authors whom Kirk tracks include the living — Fred Chappell, for example, and Gail Godwin — as well as famous authors of the first half of the 20th century such as Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kirk also becomes attached to a writer’s group whose members include published and unpublished writers, mostly retirees. Finally, he looks at the process of being published — Kirk himself works for a publisher — and at the life of the writer today.

One flaw in an otherwise witty, interesting book is Kirk’s title, which simply doesn’t ring true. Some of the authors whom Kirk stalks had only tenuous connections with Appalachia; Scott Fitzgerald came here to visit his mentally ill wife, Zelda, whom Kirk also includes as an author of Appalachia. Carl Sandburg lived in Flat Rock, but no one associates him with Appalachia. Some of the authors are unpublished, which leaves us to wonder what Kirk means by the word “author.” Kirk leaves out certain influential authors living in the Asheville area: Gary Carden, Lewis Green, Ila Yount. Finally, the word Appalachia applies to an area much larger than the Asheville area, yet it is this place alone that Kirk sets his book and seeks his people.

Despite these objections, Scribblers offers a humorous, helpful look at the writing life and at certain Asheville authors.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)