One summer about 85 years ago in a small Alabama town, a scrappy tomboy named Nelle met her new next door neighbor, Tru, a bookish, dapper dresser with a high-pitched voice and a mischievous streak.

大约是85年前的一个夏季，在美国阿拉巴马州的一个小城，争强好胜的假小子妮尔(Nelle)在镇上迎来了新来的邻居杜鲁。杜鲁穿着讲究，嗓音尖细，爱看书，是个会恶作剧的捣蛋鬼。

They made an unlikely pair. She often went barefoot in overalls while he dressed so fastidiously that a teacher said he stood out like a bird of paradise in a flock of crows. But both were oddballs who took refuge in detective novels, and they quickly bonded over their mutual love of Sherlock Holmes and the Rover Boys, spending long afternoons reading mysteries in their treehouse sanctuary. To entertain themselves, they started writing their own stories on her father’s Underwood typewriter, taking turns as one of them narrated while the other typed.

两人成为了不可思议的组合。妮尔经常光着脚，穿着背带裤。而杜鲁打扮得细致入微，以至于他的老师形容道，杜鲁像是一群乌鸦中的极乐鸟，突出夺目。两人性格都很古怪，都爱一头扎在侦探小说里。出于对《福尔摩斯探案集》(Sherlock Holmes)和《月球车男孩》(the Rover Boys)的共同喜爱，他们的关系迅速升温： 在树屋中度过许多个漫长的下午，阅读推理小说，并在妮尔父亲的安德伍德打字机上自己写故事，一人讲述，一人打字，往复交换，自我娱乐。

They grew up to be two of the South’s greatest writers — Harper Lee and Truman Capote — and their lives and work were intertwined long after that first summer. Ms. Lee drew on their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in her newly released novel, “Go Set a Watchman.” Mr. Capote based the brash, sharp-tongued tomboy Idabel Thompkins in his debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” on Nelle. They worked together on Mr. Capote’s true crime book “In Cold Blood,” then drifted apart after Mr. Capote failed to credit her properly.

长大后，他们成为了南部最优秀的两名作家——哈珀·李和杜鲁门·卡波特。在那个夏天后，各自的生活和工作也仍长久地交织在一起。哈珀在小说《杀死一只知更鸟》(To Kill a Mockingbird)中塑造了斯库特(Scout)和迪尔(Dill)，借用了她与卡波特之间的友情。此外，她也将这段关系运用在最新出版的小说《设立守望者》(Go Set a Watchman)中。卡波特则在首部小说《别的声音，别的房间》(Other Voices, Other Rooms)中塑造了盛气凌人、伶牙俐齿的假小子形象伊达贝尔·汤姆金斯(Idabel Thompkins)。在卡波特的真实犯罪小说《冷血》中，两人也有合作，但由于卡波特没有为哈珀的贡献给予充分说明，两人的关系疏远。

Their broken friendship has been restored — in fiction, at least — in a forthcoming middle-grade novel, “Tru & Nelle,” by Greg Neri. Though Ms. Lee and Mr. Capote have each individually been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries and feature films, “Tru & Nelle” is the first book to focus primarily on their childhood bond.

这段破碎的友谊已经修复，至少是在小说中——格雷格·内里(Greg Neri)撰写了面向8到12岁孩子的小说《杜鲁与妮尔》，这本书即将出版。李和卡波特分别充当过无数传记、纪录片和电影的主角，但《杜鲁与妮尔》是第一部重点关注他们童年时期联系的书。

“It was just kind of sitting there, and I couldn’t believe no one had taken it on,” said Mr. Neri, author of six books for teenagers, including “Ghetto Cowboy.” “Both she and Truman used their real lives as fodder for their fiction, and I figured if they did it, maybe I could do it too.”

“它就在那，我不敢相信竟然从来没有人发现它，”内里讲道。内里的作品包括《贫民区中的牛仔》(Ghetto Cowboy)，此外还写过五本其他的青少年读物。“她和杜鲁门将真实的生活作为小说素材，我对这种做法进行确认和研究，然后觉得或许我也可以这样做。”

“Tru & Nelle,” which is to be released next spring, will follow the release this year of previously unpublished works of fiction by both Mr. Capote, who died in 1984, and Ms. Lee, 89, who remains in Monroeville, Ala., her hometown, in an assisted living facility.

《杜鲁与妮尔》将在明年春天出版，在那之前，卡波特和哈珀·李一些未出版过的作品今年将会出版。卡波特去世于1984年。哈珀·李今年89岁，住在家乡阿拉巴马州门罗维尔(Monroeville)的一家养老院。

Last month, HarperCollins released “Go Set a Watchman,” a novel Ms. Lee wrote and set aside nearly 60 years ago. In October, Random House will publish a collection of lost short stories that Mr. Capote wrote when he was a teenager and young man. Both books shed new light on these authors’ creative development, their coming of age and their ties to the South.

哈珀柯林斯出版社(Harper Collins)上月出版了《设立守望者》，哈·珀李在60年前写了这本书，只不过写完后就把它放到了一边。十月，兰登书屋(Random House)将出版卡波特的遗作短篇小说集，这些作品写于卡波特的少年和成人时期。两本书都可以展现作者的成长轨迹，思路发展历程，以及他们的南部情结。

“They used the same town and people and events, but used them differently and saw them differently,” Mr. Neri said.

“他们使用了相同的小镇、故事和人物，只不过运用手法不同，看待的角度也不同，”内里说。

“Go Set a Watchman,” which takes place 20 years after “Mockingbird” when Scout is an adult, is punctuated by flashbacks to her childhood adventures with her brother, Jem, and her best friend, Dill, the Capote figure: “He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat,” Ms. Lee wrote. “He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.”

《设立守望者》的故事发生在《杀死一只知更鸟》的20年后，成年的斯库特脑海里不时重现童年时和哥哥杰姆(Jem)以及最好的朋友迪尔在一起的奇遇。迪尔就是那个卡波特式的人物：“他个头矮小，宽阔坚实，有着天使一般的面容和鼬鼠一般的机智，”李写道。“他比她年长一岁，但她比他高出一头。”

In one scene of “Watchman” that parallels an actual childhood incident, Dill, Scout and Jem put on a mock Baptist revival, culminating with a baptism in the fish pond. To their mortification, their antics are interrupted by dinner guests, the minister and his wife. In reality, Nelle, Truman and his cousin put on a mock carnival sideshow on a similar occasion, shocking the visitors, an episode woven into Mr. Neri’s book.

《设立守望者》中还有一个场景与童年时期李和卡波特实际遇到的事件相似。迪尔、斯库特和杰姆模仿了一场培灵会，最后在鱼塘中举行洗礼，但他们的古怪举动被来访的神父和神父的妻子打断。现实生活中，妮尔、杜鲁门和杜鲁门的表(堂)兄在相似的场合也曾模仿狂欢节的表演，震惊来宾。这个故事被内里编写进了《杜鲁与妮尔》中。

The forthcoming collection by Mr. Capote also features stories set in a small Southern town like Monroeville, where they both lived as children. Peter Haag, owner of Kein & Aber, which publishes Mr. Capote in German, stumbled upon them while doing research in the Capote archive at the New York Public Library. Some pieces had appeared in school magazines, but most had never been published. A few were printed last year in German in a German magazine.

即将出版的卡波特小说集也有一些场景设立在南部小镇门罗维尔，李和卡波特的童年都在那里度过。出版家彼得·哈格(Peter Haag)在纽约公共图书馆做卡波特资料研究时，看到这些故事时停住了。一些文章在校园杂志中出现过，但大部分从未发表。另外有一些的德文译本去年发表在德国的几本杂志上。彼得·哈格拥有Kein & Aber出版社，该出版社此前出版了卡波特作品的德文译本。

“The stories provide ample evidence that Capote had found his own voice by a very early age and, at the same time, had to work hard to develop it,” David Ebershoff, who is editing the book of stories for Random House, said in an email.

“这些故事充分证明，卡波特很早就找到了自己的风格。并且不得不勤奋写作，使这种风格得以发展，”兰登书屋即将出版的那本小说集的编辑戴维·艾伯豪夫(David Ebershoff)在一封邮件中说道。

Born a year and a half apart, the young Harper and Truman both had active imaginations and distant mothers. Neither of them fit in especially well in a small Southern community.

李和卡波特出生的日期相隔一年半，年少的二人都具有非常活跃的想像力，与母亲关系疏远，都不适应南方的小地方的生活。

“Nelle was too rough for the girls, and Truman was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector,” a family friend, Charles Ray Skinner, recalled in “Mockingbird,” Charles J. Shields’s biography of Ms. Lee. When schoolyard bullies ganged up on Truman, who was small for his age, Nelle, who was younger, got in fistfights to protect him.

“对女孩们来说，妮尔过于强硬，而杜鲁门则害怕男孩们。杜鲁门投向了妮尔，而妮尔成为了他的保护者，”与李一家相熟的朋友查尔斯·雷·斯金纳(Charles Ray Skinner)在查尔斯·J·希尔兹(Charles J. Shields)所著传记《知更鸟：哈珀·李的肖像》(Mockingbird)中回忆道。杜鲁门在同龄人中非常弱小，学校的恶霸在操场合起来欺负杜鲁门，年龄更小的妮尔就会用拳头保护他。

Ms. Lee, who stopped giving formal interviews in the 1960s, once described feeling bound to Mr. Capote by “a common anguish” and said of her childhood, “We lived in our imagination most of the time.” Mr. Capote recalled in an interview that the two often felt like “apart people.”

李在60年代停止接受正式的采访。她曾经形容她与卡波特被一种“共通的痛苦”连结在一起，谈到童年时，她说，“我们大部分时间都活在想像中。”卡波特在一次采访中回忆道，他们两个经常觉得自己“与众不同”。

Mr. Neri came up with the idea for a novel about their friendship in February 2014, when he was watching “Capote,” a biopic starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, and remembered the past that the two writers shared as children. As a longtime fan of the work of the authors, Mr. Capote in particular, Mr. Neri wondered why no one had written a book about their childhood.

内里想到要写这样一本小说是在2014年2月，当时他正在看由菲利普·塞默·霍夫曼(Philip Seymour Hoffman)主演的《卡波特》，回想起了这两个作者小时候的共同经历。作为两人的长期追随者，特别是卡波特的书迷，内里感到奇怪，为什么没有一个人就他们的童年写一本书。

He started researching their lives, reading biographies and interviews. Some of the richest material came from Jennings Faulk Carter, Mr. Capote’s cousin and a frequent co-conspirator during Tru and Nelle’s escapades. Mr. Carter gave a detailed oral history to Marianne Moates Weber for her book, “Truman Capote’s Southern Years.” “These stories were amazing — they were colorful and outrageous and funny and tragic,” Mr. Neri said in a telephone interview from Tampa, Fla., where he lives. “Tru & Nelle” hews closely to history. It opens with their first encounter one summer in Monroeville, when Nelle was 6 and Truman 7, and ends with a dramatic scene with hooded Ku Klux Klan members arriving at a Halloween party that Truman was hosting. According to an account given by Mr. Capote’s cousin, Klan members came because they heard African-American guests had been invited to the costume party, and left after Nelle’s father, A. C. Lee, confronted them.

内里开始研究李和卡波特的生活，阅读他们传记和采访。詹宁斯·福克·卡特(Jennings Faulk Carter)提供了最丰富的资料，他是卡波特的表(堂)兄，也是杜鲁和妮尔童年历险的同谋小伙伴。卡特为玛丽安娜·莫特·韦伯(Marianne Moates Weber)的《杜鲁门·卡波特的南方岁月》(Truman Capote's Southern Years)做了详细的口述。“这些故事棒极了——他们非常有色彩，有趣并且带点悲剧性”，内里在佛罗里达坦帕(Tampa)接受电话采访时这样说道，目前他居住在坦帕。《杜鲁和妮尔》非常接近于历史，以妮尔和杜鲁门六七岁时在门罗维尔的相遇开端，以3K党成员来到卡波特举办的万圣节聚会的戏剧性场面结尾。根据卡特的讲述，3K党成员之所以前来，是因为他们听说非裔美国人被邀请来化装舞会。妮尔的父亲A.C.李(A. C. Lee)和他们展开对峙，而后3K党成员离开。

The novel ends on a bittersweet note, when Truman leaves for New York not long after the Halloween party, when he is about 8 years old. The real story was much messier, though.

小说收尾的情节喜忧参半。万圣节聚会后不久，8岁的杜鲁门去了纽约，尽管真实的故事比这更复杂一点。

Mr. Capote continued to visit Monroeville in summer. He published his first novel in his early 20s. Ms. Lee, encouraged by his success, moved to New York to write when she was 23, despite her family’s misgivings.

卡波特依旧在夏天探访门罗维尔。20几岁时，他发表了第一本小说。李被他的成功而鼓励，在23岁时搬到纽约进行写作，尽管她的家里为她担心。

But their friendship was strained by bitterness and rivalry. Mr. Capote envied the success of “Mockingbird,” which won the Pulitzer Prize. Rumors spread alleging that he had written “Mockingbird” for Ms. Lee. She was stung when Mr. Capote relegated her to the acknowledgments of “In Cold Blood,” after she helped to research it and contributed 150 pages of typed notes. Toward the end of his life, Mr. Capote drank and used drugs heavily, alienating many of his friends, including Ms. Lee. He died of liver disease at the age of 59. “Drugs and alcohol did not cause his insanity, they were the result of it,” Ms. Lee wrote to an acquaintance.

他们友谊被不安和竞争的痛苦所损害。《杀死一只知更鸟》赢得普林策奖，获得成功，卡波特因此感到嫉妒。传言四起，是卡波特为李写了这本书。而卡波特在《冷血》的致谢中并未提及哈珀；此前，李帮助他做研究，打印了150页的笔记。卡波特在人生末尾过量饮酒和吸毒，疏远了包括李在内的许多朋友，59岁时因肝病去世。“他的疯狂不是药品和酒精造成的，药品和酒精只是这种疯狂的结果，”李在给一位熟人的信中写道。

Literary influence is hard to measure, and it’s impossible to say how Harper Lee and Truman Capote might have developed creatively in isolation, had they not spurred each other on as young writers.

文学上的成就难以衡量，如今人们已经很难想像，哈珀·李和杜鲁门·卡波特如果没有在年轻时相互鼓励，后来会各自发展成什么样。

Mr. Neri offers a theory toward the end of his novel, when Tru proposes a pact: “ ‘I’ll make you a deal: I’ll write, but only if you promise to write as well. Then we can mail each other our stories,’ he said, hopeful.”

内里在小说接近末尾时提供了一个解释，杜鲁提出了一个约定：“‘说定了，我会继续写作，但前提是你答应也会写作。之后我们可以把自己的故事发送给对方，’他说道，对未来充满憧憬。”