Includes: Postcard sent from Playa de Aro, Spain, 2 Oct. 1960. * Postcard sent from Munich, West Germany, though Capote give a return address in Switzerland. 29 Dec. 1960. * Postcard sent from Bridgehampton, New York, June 8, 1963.
Burt Eikleberry, a student at Oklahoma State and then the University of Kansas, wrote several times to Truman Capote, and received these postcards in response, as described in a detailed letter of provenance from Eikleberry. The first replies to a letter Eikleberry wrote after reading the short story "A Christmas Memory,' in Breakfast at Tiffany's: "Thank you for your very kind and generous letter. You might like 'Children on Their Birthdays' which is in 'A Tree of Night'..." From Switzerland, Capote responds to a query about the availability of two of Capote's books: "...The books you mention, 'The Grass Harp,' and 'A Tree of Night' are being reprinted next year; but are now available by writing 'The New American Library' (paperback)..." The final postcard, written some three years after the others, is in answer to a query about when Capote would publish something new, and Eikleberry had not mentioned that he had written Capote previously: "Dear Sir, are you pretending not to be the same Mr. E. who used to write me from Oklahoma (which is where I bought this particular card on a recent cross country trip). The record was made by United Artists Records and can be ordered from them. The book can be ordered from the Gotham Book Mart in N.Y. I am writing a book with a Kansas background. Regards - T.C." The book turned out to be In Cold Blood. The postcard Capote bought in Kansas shows a piglet nursing, with mother pig pleading "Suck, Damn It! Don't Blow." This turned up as a caption on a sweatshirt in Music for Chameleons.