When Truman Capote died in 1984, he left behind several chapters of a book he was calling Answered Prayers, a class-conscious society novel written from life and modeled after Proust. Originally contracted in 1966 and due to the publisher in ’68, the book’s progress was stalled by Capote’s notorious substance abuse problem. Only three chapters ever saw the light of day, published by Esquire in 1975 and ’76. Over a decade later, those pieces were compiled in Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, 200-page volume that most assumed was the last we’d see of the project, despite various reports of “lost” chapters.
But, incredibly, Vanity Fair stumbled upon the six-page manuscript of an Answered Prayers chapter called “Yachts and Things” at the New York Public Library. You can read the typewritten, hand-edited account of a lavish Greek-islands cruise embarked upon in the aftermath of two deaths at the magazine’s website. [via The Paris Review]