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Truman Capote published twelve books between 1948 and 1983, and the one that made him famous took six years and ended at a cemetery in Kansas. He was twenty-three when his first novel came out, and the photograph on its dust jacket, the author reclining and looking straight into the camera, caused more talk than the book. In November 1959 he read a short item in The New York Times about a farming family of four shot dead in Holcomb, Kansas, and travelled out there with his childhood friend Harper Lee. This guide covers all twelve in order, what came out after his death, the plays and screenplays, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Novels & Reportage · 1948–1983 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Truman Capote published twelve books between 1948 and 1983: three novels and novellas, four books of short stories — three of them single holiday stories from his Alabama childhood — three works of reportage and travel writing, including In Cold Blood, and two collections that mix the two. His unfinished novel Answered Prayers and his abandoned first novel, Summer Crossing, appeared after his death. Which book to begin with depends on whether you came for the novelist or the reporter.
Where to Start with Truman Capote
If you came for the reporting
→ In Cold Blood (1966).
If you only know the film
→ Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958).
If you want him at his most stripped-down
→ Music for Chameleons (1980).
If you want to start where he started
→ Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).
If you have one evening
→ A Christmas Memory (1966).
All 12 Truman Capote Books, in Order
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Thirteen-year-old Joel Knox is sent from New Orleans, after his mother's death, to live with the father he has never met at Skully's Landing, a decaying house in rural Alabama. The father turns out to be bedridden, and the household is run by a stepmother and an eccentric cousin, Randolph. Capote wrote much of it in his early twenties, and the dust-jacket photograph of the author drew almost as much attention as the novel itself.
A Tree of Night and Other Stories
Eight stories, most of them first printed in magazines while Capote was in his early twenties. They include “Miriam”, about a widow in Manhattan visited by a strange little girl who shares her name, which won an O. Henry Award for best first-published story, and “Shut a Final Door”, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1947.
Local Color
A short book of travel sketches from the late 1940s — New Orleans, New York, Hollywood, Haiti, Ischia, Tangier and Spain — first printed in magazines and published with photographs. The pieces were later folded into The Dogs Bark (1973).
The Grass Harp
When gentle Dolly Talbo walks out on her domineering sister Verena, she climbs into a treehouse in a chinaberry tree with the orphaned boy Collin Fenwick and her friend Catherine, and half the town follows them out. Capote drew on his own Alabama childhood; he adapted the book for Broadway in 1952, and it was filmed in 1995.
The Muses Are Heard
In 1955 Capote travelled with an American touring company taking the opera Porgy and Bess to Leningrad, and wrote it up for The New Yorker as a comedy of manners about cultural diplomacy at the height of the Cold War. It was his first book-length piece of reporting, a decade before In Cold Blood.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A writer looks back on the war years in New York and his neighbour, Holly Golightly, a young woman from the country who lives on the money men give her and keeps a cat she has never named. Harper's Bazaar bought the novella and then balked at printing it; it appeared in Esquire in 1958 and was published with three stories, among them “A Christmas Memory”. Blake Edwards' 1961 film, with Audrey Hepburn, rewrote the ending.
Forget the film first. Holly Golightly on the page is sharper, sadder and nowhere near as tidy as Audrey Hepburn made her.
— LisanneIn Cold Blood
Start hereOn 15 November 1959 four members of the Clutter family were shot dead in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote read a short item about it in The New York Times, travelled out with Harper Lee, and spent six years on the case, interviewing the townspeople, the detectives and the two killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, until they were hanged in April 1965. It ran in four parts in The New Yorker in 1965 before the book appeared in January 1966, and Capote called it a nonfiction novel.
Read the last four pages twice. Capote spent six years on this case, and he still ends it on a girl's grave and a field of wheat.
— LisanneA Christmas Memory
Seven-year-old Buddy and his elderly cousin and best friend, Sook, spend a November in rural Alabama gathering pecans and baking thirty fruitcakes, most of them for people they barely know. First published in Mademoiselle in 1956, it was issued as a small book of its own in 1966, the same year Capote narrated a television film of it.
The Thanksgiving Visitor
Buddy again, now tormented at school by an older bully, Odd Henderson, and horrified when Sook invites the boy to Thanksgiving dinner. It was first printed in McCall's in 1967 and published as a small book the following year.
The Dogs Bark
Capote gathered almost thirty years of nonfiction here, from the travel sketches of Local Color and the whole of The Muses Are Heard to his New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, “The Duke in His Domain”, for which he kept the actor talking through an evening in a hotel room in Kyoto.
Music for Chameleons
His last major book mixes short fiction and reporting. The longest piece, “Handcarved Coffins”, is a nonfiction account of a series of murders in a small Western town; in “A Day's Work” he follows a cleaning woman on her rounds through Manhattan apartments. In the preface he describes setting out to combine everything he had learned from fiction and from reporting in a single, plainer style.
One Christmas
The last book published in his lifetime is a single short story: the young Buddy is sent from Alabama to New Orleans to spend Christmas with the father he hardly knows. It is the most openly autobiographical of the three holiday stories.
How Many Books Did Truman Capote Write?
Twelve in his lifetime. Lists that say more are usually counting the books that came out after his death, the 1963 anthology Selected Writings, or his plays and screenplays.
- Novels and novellas — Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Read the entries →
- Short stories — A Tree of Night and Other Stories and the three holiday stories, A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor and One Christmas. Read the entries →
- Reportage — Local Color, The Muses Are Heard and In Cold Blood. Read the entries →
- Collections — The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980), which mix fiction and nonfiction. Read the entries →
- Published after his death — the unfinished novel Answered Prayers, his first novel Summer Crossing, his letters, essays and early stories. See the full list →
In What Order to Read Truman Capote
His books are not a series, so you can start anywhere. Two things are worth knowing: Summer Crossing was written in the 1940s, abandoned, and only published in 2005, so by date of writing it is his earliest novel; and the three holiday stories read best together, as one portrait of a boy and his elderly cousin.
A reading path
1. In Cold Blood (1966)
2. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
3. Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)
4. A Christmas Memory (1966), The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968) and One Christmas (1983)
5. Music for Chameleons (1980)
6. Answered Prayers (1986)
Everything Else Truman Capote Wrote: The Full List
Beyond the twelve books: what came out after his death, the anthologies, and the plays and films he wrote. The books you can actually buy sit at the top of each form.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
Published after his death
6
6 books · 1986–2015
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (1986)
The novel he promised for almost twenty years and never finished: three chapters, including “La Côte Basque 1965”, whose barely disguised society gossip cost him most of his rich friends when Esquire printed it in 1975.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Summer Crossing (2005)
His first novel, written in the 1940s and abandoned: a debutante left alone in Manhattan for the summer secretly marries a parking-lot attendant.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
- 1987A Capote Readera large anthology of his fiction and nonfiction
- 2004Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capotehis letters, edited by his biographer Gerald Clarke
- 2007Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capotehis collected essays
- 2015The Early Stories of Truman Capotestories from his teenage years, found in his papers at the New York Public Library
Collections and anthologies
2
2 books · 1963–2004
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (2004)
All twenty of his short stories in one volume, from “Miriam” to “One Christmas”.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
- 1963Selected Writingsan anthology published in his lifetime, before In Cold Blood
Plays and screenplays
4
4 works · 1952–1961
- 1952The Grass Harp: A Playhis stage version of the novella
- 1953Beat the Devilscreenplay, written with John Huston
- 1954House of Flowersthe book for a Broadway musical, with music by Harold Arlen
- 1961The Innocentsscreenplay, written with William Archibald, from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
Quick facts about Truman Capote
- Born
- September 30, 1924, New Orleans, Louisiana
- Died
- August 25, 1984, Los Angeles, aged 59
- Birth name
- Truman Streckfus Persons
- Childhood
- Monroeville, Alabama, next door to Harper Lee, who based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on him
- First job
- Copy boy at The New Yorker, from 1942
- Coined
- The “nonfiction novel”, for In Cold Blood (1966)
- Awards
- O. Henry Awards for his early stories; the Edgar Award for In Cold Blood (1966)
- Screen work
- Screenplays for Beat the Devil (1953) and The Innocents (1961)
- Books
- 12 in his lifetime, from Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) to One Christmas (1983)
- Famous for
- The Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, New York, in November 1966
How Truman Capote Wrote: A Novelist's Eye on Real Events
Capote wrote his first drafts lying down. “I am a completely horizontal author,” he told The Paris Review in 1957, describing afternoons on a bed or a couch with cigarettes and coffee, moving on to sherry and martinis as the day wore on. The first version was written in pencil, in longhand; the typewriter came later.
For In Cold Blood he took no notes and used no tape recorder in his interviews, saying he had trained himself to remember conversations almost word for word, and he wrote up what he had heard each evening. He called the result a nonfiction novel: a true story told with the scenes, dialogue and shifting points of view of fiction.
That method is also where the criticism starts. Reporters who later went back to Holcomb found details that did not match the record, and the book's closing scene at the Clutter graves is widely regarded as Capote's own invention. He never finished another book on the same scale; he spent the last two decades of his life promising Answered Prayers.
Watch
Truman Capote on In Cold Blood
On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson asks him how the book was made. This is the first of three parts on the official Johnny Carson channel.
Frequently asked questions about Truman Capote's books
How many books did Truman Capote write?
Truman Capote published twelve books in his lifetime, from Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) to One Christmas (1983). More appeared after his death in 1984, including the unfinished novel Answered Prayers (1986) and his first novel, Summer Crossing (2005), along with his letters, essays and early stories.
What are Truman Capote's books in order?
In order of first publication: Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), Local Color (1950), The Grass Harp (1951), The Muses Are Heard (1956), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1966), A Christmas Memory (1966), The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968), The Dogs Bark (1973), Music for Chameleons (1980) and One Christmas (1983).
What was Truman Capote's first book?
His first published book was the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), which came out when he was twenty-three. He had written an earlier novel, Summer Crossing, in the 1940s, but abandoned it; it was not published until 2005.
Is In Cold Blood a true story?
Yes. It tells the story of the murder of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in November 1959, and of the two men who were hanged for it in 1965. Capote presented it as fact, but later reporting showed that some details, including the final scene, were reconstructed or invented.
Is Breakfast at Tiffany's a book?
Yes. Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella Capote published in 1958, first in Esquire and then as a book with three short stories. The 1961 film with Audrey Hepburn changed the story: in the book, Holly Golightly leaves New York for good, and there is no romance at the end.
Did Truman Capote finish Answered Prayers?
No. Capote worked on Answered Prayers on and off from the late 1950s until his death in 1984 and never finished it. Three chapters were published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976 and collected as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel in 1986.
Were Truman Capote and Harper Lee friends?
Yes. They grew up next door to each other in Monroeville, Alabama, and Lee based the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on him. In December 1959 she travelled with him to Kansas and helped with the interviews for In Cold Blood.
When did Truman Capote die?
Truman Capote died on August 25, 1984, in Los Angeles, at the home of his friend Joanna Carson, a month before his sixtieth birthday. The cause of death was given as liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.
Footnotes
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“…the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)
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