A keepsake collection of Capote's finest short non-fiction, PORTRAITS AND OBSERVATIONS is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published aby this most beloved of writers. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to meditations about fame, fortune, and the writer's art at the peak of his career, to the brief works penned during the isolated denouement of his life, these essays provide an essential window into mid-twentieth-century America as offered żeby one of its canniest observers.