Summer Crossing

Infobox Book |
name = Summer Crossing
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Penguin Classics cover, published 2005
author = Truman Capote
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country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novella
publisher = Penguin
release_date = 2005
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback) & e-book, audio-CD
pages = 138 pp (Paperback edition)
isbn = ISBN 0-141-18858-8 (Penguin Paperback edition)
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"Summer Crossing" is Truman Capote's first novel, slender and tragic. It was written when Capote was 19 and working for "The New Yorker".

The book was first published in 2005, after it was thought to have been lost for over 50 years: Capote claimed to have destroyed the book, along with several other notebooks of prose, in a fit of harsh self-criticism. The writings had instead been rescued from the trash by the house sitter of an apartment in Brooklyn Heights in which Capote lived in the late 1940s. Upon the death of the house sitter, his nephew discovered Capote's papers and sent them to Sotheby's for auction in 2004. After a consultation with Capote's lawyer, "Summer Crossing" was published in 2005.

With a free-spirited, touching heroine, "Summer Crossing" anticipates Capote's beloved creation Holly Golightly in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", and the novel's sparkling wit, shimmering atmosphere and moving denouement show the qualities that made Capote one of America's major writers.

A note on the text

The first edition of "Summer Crossing" was set from Capote's original manuscript, which was written in four school notebooks and 62 supplemental notes, archived in the New York Public Library's Truman Capote collection.

Synopsis

The rich, beautiful, flame-haired, defiant Grady is the sort of girl people stare at across a room. The daughter of an important man, she is a girl people want to be introduced to. A girl to whom people sense something is going to happen.

But the privileged society life of parties, debutantes and dresses leaves her wanting more than her parents and conventional sister Apple have in mind for her. Excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking attendant. And when Grady's mother and father leave her alone for the first time in their New York penthouse one summer, their daughter's secret affair intensifies. As a heat wave envelops the city, Grady falls in deeper and deeper and cares less and less about the consequences. Soon, though, she will be forced to make decisions that will forever affect her future once the long, sultry summer of 1945 comes to a close.