[1] Capote wrote "Children on Their Birthdays" in the summer of 1948 while traveling in Europe, from London to Paris, and on to Venice, where he worked alongside Donald Windham.

[2] The story is set in rural Alabama, where Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, a precocious 10-year-old girl, moves to town with her mother.

At the end, she gets the con man's money back for all the people in the town who were cheated out of it, and as she is setting off to leave and go to Hollywood to become a movie star, she gets run over by a bus.

[3] Truman Capote's aunt Marie Rudisill notes that both characters are "unattached, unconventional wanderers, dreamers in pursuit of some ideal of happiness.

[5] It has been praised as "the jewel" of the collection A Tree of Night and Other Stories and is said to be a "perfect illustration of Capote's blending of Southern Folk writing with Jamesian classicism.