What Ever Happened to Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers Manuscript?

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans revolves around the Truman Capote’s explosive story, “La Côte Basque, 1965” and his resulting exile from Manhattan’s elite, but the series ends by focusing on a more mysterious work. Answered Prayers, his so-called “magnum opus,” was published after Capote’s death in 1984, but it only contained parts of his manuscript. The original, completed version was never found.

In the FX series, executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Capote (played by Tom Hollander) spends the finale writing the work. He crafts a story in which he seeks forgiveness from each of the Swans, and repairs their friendship. But in the end, it’s all in his imagination; he sets the manuscript on fire as his atonement. As Ann Woodward’s ghost tells him in one scene, it’s “the book or your soul.”

As for what happened to the real-life manuscript, theories abound. Here’s what we know.

Capote missed his deadline several times.

Capote reportedly had three deadline extensions for Answered Prayers.

In 1958, the year Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published, Capote wrote a letter to his publisher, Random House, stating he was working on a book called Answered Prayers, according to Penguin. Years later, in 1966, he signed a contract for the book with an advance of $25,000 and a deadline set in 1968. However, the due date came and went without the text surfacing. In 1969, according to Penguin, Random House renegotiated a three-book deal with Capote, with a $750,000 advance, due in September 1973. He missed that deadline too. Capote then signed a contract for $1 million for submission in 1981, Town & Country reports.

By the time Capote died in 1984 in Bel Air, he had not submitted a finished manuscript for Answered Prayers. But in 1986, parts of it that were found were published.

Still, Capote talked it up.

Answered Prayers, in its unfinished published format, was only three chapters, including “La Côte Basque, 1965,” which exposed the personal affairs of New York’s upper-class women, who were once Capote’s closest friends. There was also “Unspoiled Monsters,” about a gay hustler scheming to further his writing career, and “Kate McCloud,” which was inspired by Capote’s friend and socialite Mona von Bismarck, according to Vanity Fair. Per the author’s journals, he was supposed to write seven chapters. A fourth was later found and published by VF in 2012.

Throughout the book’s years-long delay, Capote talked up Answered Prayers at length. His former lawyer Alan Schwartz told Town & Country, “And he kept saying that he had written—that he was writing—more, that he had written a lot of Answered Prayers already. He described a kite with a lot of tails and each one of these chapters would be like a tail sewed on the back of the kite itself. So, he had a lot in mind and he kept telling Joe Fox [his editor at Random House] and me that it was well under way.”

Fox, however, became less convinced as the years passed. Per T&C, he wrote in the final book’s editor’s note: “In the last few years, he seemed intent on fooling not only me and other close friends about his work on it, but even the public at large; at least twice he announced to interviewers that he had just completed the book, had handed it in to Random House and that it would be published within six months.”

Author Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, author of 2018’s Swan Song, told Penguin that Capote “was always very vocal about what he was going to write. He had great fun giving interviews and saying, ‘This is what I’m writing. Honey, I’m writing about everyone I’ve ever met, better watch out.’”

Lee Radziwill dancing with Truman Capote in 1966.

Capote’s friends searched for the manuscript after he died.

After Capote died, his homes were searched for the manuscript, and without it turning up, theories arose about its status. Perhaps he destroyed it intentionally (as is portrayed in Feud), or maybe the rest of the book was never actually written. Capote’s close friend Joanne Carson, who was hosting him when he died in her home, claims the writer told her he hid the manuscript in a safety deposit box, according to Vanity Fair. But the truth remains unclear.

“I know writers love a mystery, but there is none in this case. Truman Capote had the misfortune of dying in the home of the late Joanne Carson, and she created the myth of chapters yet to be discovered. They were in a bank vault, she said. No, they were here, no there. On and on,” his biographer, Gerald Clarke, told Town & Country. “The truth is that Joanne knew as much about Truman’s writing as one of my three dogs. What we have of Answered Prayers is all that he wrote.”

But maybe it did exist in its entirety, given how much and how vividly his friends have spoken about it. Dotson Rader, a pal of Capote’s, told T&C, “I saw it. Other people have seen it. But I wouldn’t put it past Truman, given his fear of losing it, his having put it in a storage somewhere to protect it and I have a feeling that sooner or later it’ll turn up.”