New York, NY: Modern Library | Penguin Random House (2024)

Hardback.

New in dust jacket.

Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel is an unsparing tell-all of New York high society that sent the public and Capote’s own social circles into seismic shock.

Catapulted from a childhood spent in a Missouri orphanage to the dizzying peaks of New York high society, the destitute and debauched writer P.B. Jones spends his days moving between the paltry cell in a Manhattan Y.M.C.A. and the opulent playgrounds of the metropolitan elite.

Though Jones struggles to make ends meet, his effortless associations with the moneyed and powerful thrust him into sumptuous business offices, bohemian bars inhabited by the likes of Sartre and De Beauvoir, and the trendiest restaurants, where the tables are arranged by the social status of their occupants. Jones’ days and nights are a riptide of dysfunctional dinner parties and drunken heiresses, accompanied by a carousel of legendary female characters who populated Capote’s own life, among them Colette, Jackie Kennedy, and the Duchess of Windsor. Indeed, Answered Prayers teems with the real-life secrets and confessions of Capote’s most trusted friends, and these pages, when first published as a magazine serial, astounded readers but betrayed his confidantes, banishing him from the exclusive circle that was once his.

Unrestrained and irreverent, Answered Prayers renders a carnival of wealth and influence so unthinkable it satirizes itself—with the inimitable wit of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. In 1948, his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published to international critical acclaim, assuring Capote a place among the prominent postwar American writers. He won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize twice and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His other works include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Grass Harp, and the nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood. Truman Capote died on August 25, 1984 in Los Angeles.