An Unfinished Truman Capote Story from the 1950s Is Published for the First Time
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Nearly 40 years after Truman Capote's death, there's new work by the famed author to read!
This week, the Strand Magazine announced that an unpublished Capote story, "Another Day In Paradise," will appear in publication's new issue. Per the The Strand, "The story remained unpublished until it was found handwritten in the pages of a red and gold scrolled Florentine notebook. It has, like so much of Capote’s other works, some autobiographical elements, as well as Capote’s signature style—evocative descriptions, wry humor, and all too human characters."
Capote wrote the story in Italy. In 1950, he moved from New York City to Taormina, Sicily, where he lived in a villa named Fontana Vecchia. According to the Associated Press, the story reflects his time in Sicily: "Written at a time of relative contentment for Capote, 'Another Day' is a narrative of disillusion and entrapment: The middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree has used her inheritance — a small one because her mother didn’t trust her with money — to buy a villa in Sicily. She will end up betrayed by the local man who persuaded to invest her money, Signor Carlo Petruzzi, and too broke to sell the home and return to the U.S."
Editor of The Strand, Andrew F. Gulli, found the story in papers of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Capote's handwritten script, in pencil, was hard to read, Gulli says. It proved "extremely difficult to decipher," he tells The Guardian. "Our transcriber… had a difficult time. The fiction editor had a very difficult time and finally Louise Schwartz at the Truman Capote estate, who is an accomplished writer in her own right, looked at the manuscript and gave us a lot of helpful input. So it took a village to bring this into the wonderful order it is in now."
Gulli also speculated on why he thought "Another Day in Paradise" went unpublished. "The works that ended up paying bills for authors were not short stories. They were novels. But some authors really excelled at short stories and loved writing them and Capote was one of those people. And if you find something completed by Capote, you can count on it being something that’s very, very satisfying," he says. "In several correspondences he said he loved stories because they forced him to be succinct. They forced him to write something very entertaining, in a very small package. When it came to short stories, with Truman Capote, you knew you were going to get something that was a very fine quality."
Capote is set to have a big a moment in pop culture. He's the subject of Ryan Murphy's upcoming TV show, Feud: Captoe's Women, which will tell the story of how he befriended society women—like Babe Paley, C. Z. Guest, and Lee Radziwill—but then wrote a book based on their lives.
"Another Day in Paradise" is available to read in Issue 70 of the Strand Magazine.
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