Summer Crossing, Truman Capote
Summer Crossing, Truman Capote
List: $12.49 | Sale: $8.75
Club: $6.24

Summer Crossing

Author: Truman Capote

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 3 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/13/2005


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. He rose to international prominence in 1948 with the publication of his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. His other works of fiction include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, and Summer Crossing, the author’s long-lost first novel, which was rediscovered in 2004 and published by Random House in 2005. His nonfiction novel In Cold Blood is widely considered one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died on August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on June 06, 2023

Exactly how much trouble can a filthy rich, spoiled Manhattan teenage girl get into when her parents leave via ocean liner for summer in Europe? Our young lady with impeccable WASP credentials hooks up with a Jewish parking lot attendant from Brooklyn. Chaos ensues. This sounds like a grade-B movie......more

Goodreads review by Lawyer on July 17, 2012

Summer Crossing: Truman Capote's True First Novel Summer Crossing appears to be Capote's true first novel which he abandoned. In fact, the manuscript was among papers left in an apartment in the care of a house sitter. Capote instructed the house sitter to put all papers on the street to be picked up......more

Goodreads review by Amy on October 04, 2009

I adored this book. It may not be as polished as many of his later works, and some of the characters not half as developed, but it's a nice little novella to read on a warm, sunny afternoon, and there are some moments within it that are simply magical, written so beautifully that the hairs on the ba......more


Quotes

“Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation.”—Norman Mailer