Reception and Critical Analysis
The New York Herald Tribune lauded the novel as "Remarkable...infused with a tender laughter, charming human warmth, a feeling for the positive quality of life." The Atlantic Monthly commented that "The Grass Harp charms you into sharing the author's feeling that there is a special poetry - a spontaneity and wonder and delight - in lives untarnished by conformity and common sense." Sales of The Grass Harp reached 13,500, more than double those of either A Tree of Night or Local Color, two of Capote's prior works.
The Grass Harp was Truman Capote's favorite personal work, despite that it was critiqued as being overly sentimental.
Read more about this topic: The Grass Harp
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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