Rare Truman Capote story from early 1950s being published for first time

22 September 2023

Books Truman Capote. Picture: PA

Another Day In Paradise was written while the author was living in Sicily in the 1950s.

An early Truman Capote story is being published for the first time.

Another Day In Paradise was written while the author, who died in 1984, just before his 60th birthday, was living in Sicily in the 1950s.

The tale, which appears in the new issue of The Strand magazine, is one of disillusion and entrapment.

Capote, who penned classics such as In Cold Blood and Breakfast At Tiffany’s, had a history of work left unfinished and unpublished.

He spent much of his later years struggling to write his planned Proustian masterpiece Answered Prayers, of which excerpts were released.

Capote, who penned classics such as In Cold Blood and Breakfast At Tiffany’s, had a history of work left unfinished and unpublished.(Carl Van Vechten/Geopix/Alamy/PA)

Shorter work, too, was sometimes abandoned, including Another Day In Paradise.

The Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and many others.

Managing editor Andrew Gulli found Capote’s story in the Library of Congress, inside an “old red and gold-scrolled Florentine notebook”, he writes on the Strand editorial page.

The handwritten manuscript, in pencil, was at times so hard to make out that Mr Gulli needed a transcriber to help prepare it for publication.

By Press Association