Truman Capote's long-lost first novel to be published

NEW YORK - Truman Capote's long-lost first novel "Summer Crossing," discovered among a cache of the author's papers last year, will be published next month, Random House said on Thursday last week.

Public interest in the author has been stoked this month by the release of the film "Capote," the true story of how he came to write "In Cold Blood," the first of a genre called the "nonfiction novel," about two drifters who murdered a family of four in Kansas.

Random House publisher Gina Centrello said the manuscript of "Summer Crossing," which Capote began in 1943, was among the papers in a box of documents put up for sale in late 2004 through Sotheby's by a relative of Capote's former housesitter. Capote apparently thought the manuscript had been destroyed.

The manuscript, comprising four handwritten notebooks with many corrections and a sheaf of loose leaf notes, is now kept at the New York Public Library.

"In 1966, Truman Capote, flush with the wealth from the recent publication of 'In Cold Blood,' abandoned his humble Brooklyn apartment along with its contents -- which included a box of documents that his housesitter thoughtfully rescued from the curb," Centrello said in a statement.

Capote, who also wrote "Breakfast at Tiffany's," died in 1984 and since then scholars and biographers had believed the manuscript of "Summer Crossing" to be lost.

Set in New York just after World War II, "Summer Crossing" is the story of a young lighthearted socialite, Grady McNeil, whose parents leave her alone in their Manhattan penthouse for the summer while they travel to France to check on their war-torn villa, Centrello said.

Grady turns up the heat on the secret affair she's been having with a Brooklyn-born Jewish war veteran who works as a parking lot attendant. As the season passes, the romance turns more serious.

Justin Caldwell, a vice president at Sotheby's book department who read the manuscript last year, said he was very impressed by the book, although it was very different from "Other Voices, Other Rooms," Capote's first published novel.

"This is a little lighter and it's all set in New York. It's more like a forerunner to 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' rather than southern Gothic," Caldwell said.

The book will be published on October 25 and publishers in six other countries also plan to publish it, according to Random House, a division of German media group Bertelsmann.

- REUTERS