Truman Capote Story: Lost Chapter Appears

A previously unpublished chapter of Truman Capote’s book “Answered Prayers” has been discovered and will be published in the December issue of Vanity Fair. Capote famously stalled th...
Truman Capote Story: Lost Chapter Appears
Written by Amanda Crum
  • A previously unpublished chapter of Truman Capote’s book “Answered Prayers” has been discovered and will be published in the December issue of Vanity Fair.

    Capote famously stalled the book’s publication by missing deadlines, despite being offered more and more money to complete it. By the time the last deadline was missed, the publication advance was up to $1 million, but he was still unable to finish it. The chapters he’d completed were put together in an edition of Esquire Magazine in the early ’80s, but it was widely known that the story was incomplete. The discovery of this lost chapter is one more piece in the peculiar puzzle that was Capote.

    The chapter, entitled “Yachts And Things”, is much shorter than the others, which has sent much speculation around those who’ve followed and documented Capote’s career.

    “The title, ‘Yachts and Things’, is indeed the title of one of the chapters he planned for ‘Answered Prayers’,” biographer Gerald Clarke said. “But that chapter would have been much longer than six pages … I don’t know why this one was not published. My guess is that he thought it fell short in some way.”

    Capote had many of his high-society friends in an uproar over the book after they discovered it was, by and large, about them and their scandalous lives. He was known to create waves in the literary world, breaking through in 1948 with his novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and later, creating the best-selling “In Cold Blood”, which many think was actually written by his good friend since childhood, “To Kill A Mockingbird” author Harper Lee.

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