Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel - Composition

Composition

In the introduction to his 1980 collection, Music for Chameleons, Capote detailed the writing process of the novel:

For four years, roughly from 1968 through 1972, I spent most of my time reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing my own letters, other people's letters, my diaries and journals (which contain detailed accounts of hundreds of scenes and conversations) for the years 1943 through 1965... in 1972 I began work on by writing the last chapter first (it's always good to know where one is going). Then I wrote the first chapter, "Unspoiled Monsters". Then the fifth, "A Severe Insult to the Brain". Then the seventh, "La Cote Basque". I went on in this manner, writing different chapters out of sequence. I was able to do this only because the plot—or rather plots—was true, and all the characters were real... I hadn't invented anything...

If this "official" chronology is to believed, Capote stopped work on Answered Prayers in September 1977 after suffering what he considered to be a "nervous breakdown". After a period of consideration and reorganization, he claimed to have conducted substantial revisions on the chapters published in Esquire with the exception of "Mojave," a story outside the diegetic framework of the novel that was intended to be the second chapter. It would later see publication in 1980 as a standalone work in Music for Chameleons.

However, further evidence makes Capote's statements seem less credible. Fox corroborates Capote to a large extent and claimed to have seen all four of the Esquire chapters in 1975, but Gerald Clarke's biography indicates that only the recently-written "Mojave" and "La Cote Basque" were in any sort of publishable condition by that date. (Nonetheless, both "Unspoiled Monsters" and "Kate McCloud" were published by the end of 1976). Capote's legendary and almost stenographic journals, considered by a minority of friends to have been the true bread and butter of his literary output, have never surfaced after his death, let alone in a revised form. By all accounts, he spent those years in a drug and alcohol induced haze.