Summer Crossing: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The long-lost first novel from literary titan Truman Capote: a razor-sharp account of love and wayward youth in 1940s New York City

“Witness the coming together of Truman Capote’s voice, the electric-into-neon blaze that is surely one of the premier styles of postwar American literature.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A great breezy read . . . with Capote’s trademark wit, but also with genuine youthful awe at the exhilaration of late-forties New York.”—New York

In late 2004, a trove of abandoned documents from Truman Capote’s Brooklyn apartment went up for auction at Sotheby’s. Included in the lot were four notebooks containing the handwritten manuscript of Summer Crossing, which Capote began writing in 1943 and set aside when he turned his attentions into what would be his stunning literary debut, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Since the time of his death in 1984, Capote scholars and biographers had long believed this manuscript gone, never to be recovered.

Set in New York just after World War II, Summer Crossing follows a carefree young socialite, Grady McNeil, whose parents leave her alone in their Fifth Avenue penthouse for the summer. Left to her own devices, 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 and morally ambiguous, and Grady must eventually make a series of decisions that will forever affect her life and the lives of everyone around her.

A lost treasure found, Summer Crossing is a precocious, confident first novel that displays the nearly perfect prose and flawless narrative sense of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Truman Capote was born September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. After his parents’ divorce, he was sent to live with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. It was here he would meet his lifelong friend, the author Harper Lee. Capote rose to international prominence in 1948 with the publication of his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Among his celebrated works are Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, Summer Crossing, A Christmas Memory, and In Cold Blood, widely considered one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Twice awarded the O. Henry Short Story Prize, Capote was also the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award and an Edgar Award. He died August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.