Houston Diary. Truman Capote’s unfinished project

Abstract

In January 1974, The Washington Post was about to print a series of reports on the Houston mass murders perpetrated by the pedophile serial killer Dean Corll. The newspaper announced that the sensationalist reports would be written by Truman Capote, who had already published a well-known documentary novel In Cold Blood (1966). The new project, entitled Houston Diary, promised to become yet another true-crime bestseller. Despite the newspaper’s extensive promotion and the readership’s big interest, the coverage of the trial was never published. Capote refused to proceed with the project, citing ill health, and later would avoid discussing the subject altogether. What was the real reason for the project’s termination and what happened to the writer’s archive pertaining to the ‘Houston case’? Zakharov studied the papers acquired by the New York Public Library in 2019 and found facts that shed light on Capote’s unrealised project to be styled afer In Cold Blood. The article tells of the papers’ discovery and suggests including Houston Diary in Capote’s bibliography as an unfnished work.