Like FX’s FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans and Already Read In Cold Blood? Here’s Some More of His Writing

Author Truman Capote’s eye for detail and drama and his characters’ dialogue written with such a specific patter that then-New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote her 2005 review of Capote’s posthumously published novel Summer Crossing in the tone of his most famous heroine, Breakfast at Tiffany’s society girl Holly Golightly. (“I always told Truman he was far too hung up on class and all that rubbish,” deadpans Kakutani in the review, something one can imagine Holly’s on-screen persona, Audrey Hepburn, saying breathlessly while adjusting her large black sunglasses).

In addition to Tiffany’s, Capote was famous for writing what was called “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. This feat of investigative reporting about four small-town homicides decades gave the audience a bloodthirsty thrill before the term “true crime” was synonymous with names like Sarah Koenig, Michelle McNamara, and Andrew Jarecki. The six years Capote spent immersed in the 1959 killings of four members of the Clutter family, and the subsequent trial and conviction of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, warranted the writer “$2-million in magazine, book, and film payments,” the Times reported in 1965.

He was infamous, however, for the events like the ones depicted in FX’s FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans. Set after the publication of In Cold Blood, the miniseries finds Capote (portrayed by Tom Hollander) more of a bloated and broke self-important gossip who sells the only thing he has left to sell: works of technical fiction that were really thinly veiled screeds about the New York society women who’d entrusted him with their friendship and secrets. (With his flair for the sartorial and a voice seemingly suffering from perpetual post-nasal drip, Capote—who died at age 59 in 1984—was a personality just begging to be imitated. Most notably, there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for portraying him in Capote, and Robert Morse, who won a Tony for portraying him in the one-man show Tru and a subsequent Emmy for starring in an American Playhouse presentation of that play).

FEUD is airing through March on FX and Hulu. But what other works by Capote besides In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s are worth reading? Here’s a list of a few.

Miriam: A Classic Story of Loneliness

First published in the June 1945 issue of Mademoiselle magazine (and later winning an O. Henry Award), one of Capote’s first published works follows a widow who insists she wants to be alone. She then gets increasingly freaked out by the young woman who keeps appearing at her door. 

Lots of English literature class synopsis ink has been spilled on this story, as it relates to isolation, loneliness, grief, and our natural human fears surrounding aging and death. But Capote apparently snapped at a college student whom he felt didn’t understand his story. In 2018, the Times profiled a woman who’d discovered a letter Capote had written to her (now late) mother in 1945. It appeared to be in response to a critique her mother, then a college junior, had written to him. “I take it you do not understand Miriam’s relation to Mrs. Miller,” he wrote before explaining the story to her as if it were a fairy tale.

Miriam would later be included in Capote’s 1949 collection, A Tree of Night and Other Stories. The seven other pieces in that anthology share similar themes. These include Children on Their Birthdays, which was adapted into a 2002 film directed by Mark Medoff and starring a young Jesse Plemons. 

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Published when he was only 23, Capote’s first novel is Southern Gothic in style with hints at what will be his lifelong obsessions with the cause of evil, outsiders, conformity, and class structure. The semi-autobiographical book is about a 13-year-old named Joel whose mother dies and is therefore forced to move to New Orleans and live with the father who abandoned him. While his dad is not the man he expects him to be, Joel is also stunned to meet people who don’t fit the status quo. These include a queer man who might dress in women’s clothing and a sexually aggressive circus performer. 

The book also included Harold Halma’s haunting, sultry, and (then-)controversial author photo. But the reading public of 1948 was here for it and the book made the Times’ best-seller list.

The Grass Harp

Dubbed “the best book [Capote] has yet written” by the Times and an “appealing modern folktale which is full of humor, tenderness and his particular type of antenna-awareness” by Kirkus when it was published in 1951, The Grass Harp is once again a semi-autobiographical story. 

Drawing on Capote’s own childhood experiences, it’s about an orphaned teen who goes to live with his eccentric extended family. Eventually, through a convolution of events, they end up living in a treehouse.

House of Flowers 

First published as a short story in 1950, this grew into Capote’s first musical (he wrote the book; Harold Arlen wrote the music and they collaborated on the lyrics). Set in Haiti, it’s about a sex worker who attempts to escape this life to be with the poor mountain boy she loves, and the madam who doesn’t want to let that happen.

The musical House of Flowers had its Broadway opening in December 1954 with a cast that included Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, and Diahann Carroll. It includes the number “A Sleepin’ Bee,” a song that would touch a young Barbra Streisand so much that she’d use it in an early nightclub act

The Dogs Bark

Although no one would ever think of him as an unbiased witness, Capote’s writing always had a journalistic tone as he told readers in great detail about the lives of others. Some of those people were real, and not just in the case of In Cold Blood. 

This compilation of his nonfiction writings includes The Muses Are Heard, in which the author reported on an attempt to stage a production of the musical Porgy and Bess in 1950s Russia and his infamous take-down of Marlon Brando for The New Yorker (“The voice went on, as though speaking to hear itself, an effect Brando’s speech often has, for, like many persons who are intensely self-absorbed, he is something of a monologuist—a fact that he recognizes and for which he offers his own explanation”).

La Cote Basque / Answered Prayers

The story that would prove to be Capote’s undoing, at least among the New York elite, was La Cote Basque. Named for a certain restaurant that catered to the original Real Housewives, this is the short story that ran in a 1965 issue of Esquire and spilled a heck of a lot of tea. Mistakes were made on both sides here; Capote bit the hand who (sometimes quite literally) fed him and the ladies who lunch assumed everything they said was off the record even if they were delighted to hear of the demise of others.

This story, along with other offending pieces, would go on to be part of Capote’s unfinished final novel, Answered Prayers.

Summer Crossing

Technically Capote’s first novel, although it went unpublished until 2005, Summer Crossing was frequently compared to Breakfast Tiffany’s because it features its own flighty heroine who’s not ready for adulting (Here, she’s 17-year-old Grady McNeil, who comes from New York and money. There, she was Holly Golightly, who came from nowhere and none). 

The book has the bones of Capote’s favorite tenets; namely, outsiderism and queer coding. And The Guardian’s review noted that this “story of [Grady’s] spiraling self-destruction, while awkward and incoherent at times, is told with jagged lightning-bursts of brilliance.” 

It had been reported that Scarlett Johansson would direct a film adaptation of Summer Crossing, although there hasn’t really been any heat on that since 2015.

Another Day in Paradise

Another one of Capote’s pieces to be published after his death—it was found, hand-written and faded, shoved in a notebook at the Library of Congress, which houses Capote’s papers— this short story appeared in a 2023 issue of The Strand magazine. This short story, written while Capote was living in Sicily, follows a middle-aged heiress who falls for a real estate con.

---

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and cats.