Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. In it, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor, Holly Golightly, who is one of Capote's best-known creations. In 1961 it was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name.
The novella is set in 1940s New York, specifically the Upper East Side, in a brownstone apartment. An area that experienced many changes following the Civil War, it went through its most major shift at the turn of the century. Broadly speaking, brownstones (the type of building that Holly lives in) were rebranded as more "stylish" places to live, rather than being thought of as decrepit and outdated buildings.[2] By the 1940s, it had become a fairly affluent area. The novella's setting plays a great role in the plot; various wealthy characters from the Upper East Side come in and out of Holly Golightly's life.
Though the novella does not take place in the American South, there are mentions of it later in the novella: We follow Golightly's life in Manhattan for the entirety of the novella, but she was actually born in Texas, a place that she was desperate to escape.
Plot
In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator befriends Holly Golightly. The two are tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Holly (age 18–19) is a country girl turned New York café society girl. As such, she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she hopes to marry one of them. According to Capote, Golightly is not a prostitute, but an "American geisha".[3]
As the novella opens, we are introduced to an unnamed narrator who reflects back on his friendship with Holly Golightly. Another old friend, Joe Bell, reaches out to the narrator because he believes a wood carving that he has come across depicts Golightly. We can assume many years have passed, as the carving is said to be from 1956.
The narrator recalls the specific night he meets Holly. She climbs through his window in order to escape the man that came home with her that night. She mentions the resemblance the narrator has to her brother, Fred, and asks if she can call him that. As they continue to talk, Holly realizes it is Thursday, and explains to the narrator that she visits a prisoner, Sally Tomato, every Thursday in exchange for $100.
We are introduced to a slew of characters that are constantly coming in and out of Holly's apartment. During this scene, she strikes up a conversation with our narrator about how Tiffany's is the only place that calms her when she's feeling anxious or overwhelmed. The title is attributed to this scene.
The narrator and Holly's friendship develops, but they feud over a trifling matter. However, when the narrator suspects Holly is being watched, he decides it may be right to break the feud to warn her about this person. He is confronted by the man who has been watching her. The man tells the narrator of Holly's past. He divulges that she was born Lulamae Barnes, and that he is her husband, Doc Golightly. Doc tries to persuade her to come back to Texas with him, but she insists she must stay in New York. They part ways.
Holly finds out her brother has died in the war and this sends her into an emotional down spiral. She eventually strikes up a relationship with a character named Jose Ybarra-Jaegar and plans to move to Brazil with him.
Eventually, Holly's visits to the prison draw suspicion and she is arrested after further evidence unveils that Sally Tomato was running a drug ring. Jose sends her a letter explaining that he does not see a future with her because of her arrest. After getting out on bail, she plans to leave and go to Brazil without Jose. Before leaving, she sets her cat loose—the cat that she had never given a name. The narrator receives a brief note from her, but hears nothing else. He hopes, though, she has found a place that feels like home.[4]
Characters
The unnamed narrator-writer: a writer who relates his memories of Holly Golightly, the people in her life, and his relationship with her.
Holiday (Holly) Golightly: downstairs neighbor and center of attention of the writer's memoirs.
Joe Bell: A bartender acquainted with both the writer and Holly.
Mag Wildwood: Holly's friend and sometime roommate, a fellow socialite and model.
Rusty Trawler: A presumably wealthy man, thrice divorced, well known in society circles.
José Ybarra-Jaegar: A Brazilian diplomat, who is the companion of Mag Wildwood and, later, of Holly.
Doc Golightly: A veterinarian from Texas, whom Holly married as a teenager.
O. J. Berman: A talent agent from Hollywood, who has discovered Holly and groomed her to become a professional actress.
Salvatore "Sally" Tomato: A convicted racketeer, whom Holly visits weekly in Sing Sing prison.
Madame Sapphia Spanella: Another tenant in the brownstone.
Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi: A Japanese photographer, who lives in the top floor studio apartment of the brownstone.
Conception
In early drafts of the story Holly was named Connie Gustafson; Capote later changed her name to Holiday Golightly. He apparently based the character of Holly on several different women, all friends or close acquaintances of his. Claims have been made as to the source of the character, the "real Holly Golightly", in what Capote called the "Holly Golightly Sweepstakes",[5] including socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, actress Oona O'Neill,[6] writer/actress Carol Grace,[7] writer Maeve Brennan,[8] writer Doris Lilly,[9] model Dorian Leigh (whom Capote dubbed "Happy Go Lucky"),[10][11] and her sister, model Suzy Parker. A November 2020 obituary in The New York Times states that the main inspiration for Holly was socialite Marguerite Littman.[12]
Several women (or their agents) claimed to be models for Holly Golightly. Many were dark-haired sophisticated beauties like Audrey Hepburn, yet Capote has said his model was a blonde ("strands of albino-blonde and yellow") closer in character to Marilyn Monroe, whom he preferred for the film role that ultimately went to Hepburn.[13]
Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke wrote "half the women he knew... claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine."[6] Clarke also wrote of the similarities between the author himself and the character.[14] There are also similarities between the lives of Holly and Capote's mother, Nina Capote; among other shared attributes both women were born in the rural south with similar "hick" birth names that they changed (Holly Golightly was born Lulamae Barnes in Texas, Nina Capote was born Lillie Mae Faulk in Alabama), both left the husbands they married as teenagers and abandoned relatives they loved and were responsible for, instead going to New York, and both achieved "café society" status through relationships with wealthier men, though Capote's mother was born two decades earlier than the fictional Holly Golightly.[6][15] Capote was also unsuccessfully sued for libel and invasion of privacy by a Manhattan resident named Bonnie Golightly who claimed that he had based Holly on her.[6]
According to the biographer of Joan McCracken, McCracken had a violent dressing room outburst after learning of the wartime death of her brother, while she was appearing in the play Bloomer Girl (1944). McCracken's biographer suggests that Capote was inspired by this event as a model for a scene in which Holly reacts to her brother's death overseas. McCracken and her husband Jack Dunphy were close friends of Capote, and Dunphy became Capote's life companion after his 1948 divorce from McCracken. In the novella, Holly Golightly is also depicted singing songs from Oklahoma! (in which McCracken appeared) accompanying herself on a guitar, and owning The Baseball Guide, which was edited by McCracken's uncle.[16]
Publication history
Breakfast at Tiffany's was originally sold to Harper's Bazaar for $2,000 and intended for publication in its July 1958 issue. It was to be illustrated with a big series of photo montages by David Attie, who had been hired for the job by Harper's art director Alexey Brodovitch. However, after the publication was scheduled, longtime Harper's editor Carmel Snow was ousted by the magazine's publisher, the Hearst Corporation, and Hearst executives began asking for changes to the novella's tart language. By this time, Attie's montages had been completed, and Alice Morris, the fiction editor of Harper's, recounted that while Capote initially refused to make any changes, he relented "partly because I showed him the layouts... six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs".[17] Yet Hearst ordered Harper's not to run the novella anyway. Its language and subject matter were still deemed "not suitable", and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively.[18][19]
An outraged Capote soon resold the work to Esquire for $3,000 ($42,200 today); by his own account, he specified that he "would not be interested if [Esquire] did not use Attie's [original series of] photographs". He wrote to Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills, "I'm very happy that you are using [Attie's] pictures, as I think they are excellent." But to his disappointment, Esquire ran just one full-page image of Attie's (another was later used as the cover of at least one paperback edition of the novella).[20] Attie's photo was the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly—who is seen laughing and smiling in a nightclub. The novella appeared in the November 1958 issue. Shortly afterward, a collection of the novella and three short stories by Capote was published by Random House — and the glowing reviews caused sales of the Esquire issue to skyrocket. Both Attie and Brodovitch went on to work with Capote on other projects – Attie on Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,[21] and Brodovitch on Observations, both published in 1959.
In 2021, Esquire re-ran the novella online, reuniting the text with many of Attie's original images.[22]
The collection has been reprinted several times with the other short stories, "House of Flowers", "A Diamond Guitar" and "A Christmas Memory". The novella itself has been included in other Capote collections.
Capote's original typed manuscript was offered for sale by a New Hampshire auction house in April 2013.[23] It was sold to Igor Sosin, a Russian billionaire entrepreneur, for US$306,000 (equivalent to US$400,000in 2023). Sosin said he planned to display it publicly in Moscow and Monte Carlo.[24]
Literary significance and reception
In "Breakfast at Sally Bowles", Ingrid Norton of Open Letters Monthly pointed out Capote's debt to Christopher Isherwood, one of his mentors, in creating the character of Holly Golightly: "Breakfast at Tiffany's is in many ways Capote's personal crystallization of Isherwood's Sally Bowles."[25]
Truman Capote's aunt, Marie Rudisill, notes that Holly is a kindred spirit of Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, the central character of his short story "Children on Their Birthdays". She observes that both characters are "unattached, unconventional wanderers, dreamers in pursuit of some ideal of happiness".[26]
Capote said Golightly was the favorite of his characters.[27]
The novella's prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote "the most perfect writer of my generation," adding that he "would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's".[28]
The novella was loosely adapted into the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn and directed by Blake Edwards. The movie was transposed to 1960 rather than the 1940s, the period of the novella. In addition to this, at the end of the film the protagonist and Holly fall in love and stay together, whereas in the novella there is no love affair whatsoever – Holly just leaves the United States and the narrator has no idea what happened to her since then, except for a photograph of a wood carving found years later in Africa which bears a striking resemblance to Holly. In addition, there are many other changes, including major omissions, to the plot and main character in the film from the novella. Capote originally envisioned Marilyn Monroe as Holly, and lobbied the studio for her, but the film was done at Paramount, and though Monroe did independent films, including for her own production company, she was still under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, and had just completed Let's Make Love with Yves Montand.
A musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's (also known as Holly Golightly) premiered in 1966 in Boston.[citation needed] The initial performances were panned by the critics and despite a rewrite by Edward Albee, it closed after four previews and never officially opened.[29]
Television
Three years after the musical adaptation, Stefanie Powers and Jack Kruschen starred in another adaptation, Holly Golightly (1969), an unsold ABC sitcom pilot. Kruschen's role was based on Joe Bell, a major character in Capote's novella who was omitted from the film version.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is a 1961 American romantic comedy film directed by Blake Edwards, written by George Axelrod, adapted from Truman Capote's 1958 novella of the same name, and starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, a naïve, eccentric café society girl who falls in love with a struggling writer while attempting to marry for money. It was theatrically released by Paramount Pictures on October 5, 1961, to critical and commercial success.
Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television productions.
Holly Golightly is a British singer-songwriter. Her mother christened her after the main character of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Her musical style ranges from garage rock to R&B.
Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya was a Russian actress and acting teacher. She achieved success as a stage actress as a young woman in Russia, and as an older woman in Hollywood films.
Joan Hume McCracken was an American dancer and actress who became famous for her role as Sylvie in the original 1943 production of Oklahoma! She also was noted for her performances in the Broadway shows Bloomer Girl (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945) and Dance Me a Song (1950), and the films Hollywood Canteen (1945) and Good News (1947).
Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 novel by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood set during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The novel recounts Isherwood's 1929–1932 sojourn as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and consists of a "series of sketches of disintegrating Berlin, its slums and nightclubs and comfortable villas, its odd maladapted types and its complacent burghers." The plot was based on factual events in Isherwood's life, and the novel's characters were based upon actual persons. The insouciant flapper Sally Bowles was based on teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross who became Isherwood's friend during his sojourn.
Carol Grace was an American actress and author. She is often referred to as Carol Marcus Saroyan or Carol Matthau.
The Grass Harp is a novel by Truman Capote published on October 1, 1951 It tells the story of an orphaned boy and two elderly ladies who observe life from a tree. They eventually leave their temporary retreat to make amends with each other and other members of society.
Alexey Vyacheslavovich Brodovitch was a Russian-American photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is a musical with music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and a book originally by Abe Burrows but rewritten during pre-Broadway tryouts by Edward Albee. It is based on the 1958 Truman Capote novella and 1961 film of the same name about a free spirit named Holly Golightly.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel by Truman Capote. It is written in the Southern Gothic style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.
Sally Bowles is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press, and commentators have described the novella as "one of Isherwood's most accomplished pieces of writing." The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories.
Golightly is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
"A Diamond Guitar" is a short story by Truman Capote, first published in Harper's Bazaar in 1950; it is noted as one of his better quality early short stories. The title refers to the prize possession of the younger man, a rhinestone-studded guitar; the guitar serves as the key image of the story.
"Children on Their Birthdays" is a short story by Truman Capote, published serially in the late 1940s and appearing in A Tree of Night and Other Stories in 1949; it is noted as one of his better quality early short stories.
Holly Golightly may refer to:
Doris Lilly was an American newspaper columnist and writer. Lilly wrote newspaper columns on high society for the New York Post between 1968 and 1978, and the New York Daily Mirror.
David Attie was a prominent American photographer, widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s. He was one of the last great proteges of legendary photography teacher and art director Alexey Brodovitch. Attie worked in a wide range of styles, illustrating everything from novels to magazine and album covers to subway posters, and taking now-iconic portraits of Truman Capote, Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others. He also created the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly, the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when he illustrated the Capote novella's first appearance in Esquire Magazine. He was best known in his lifetime for his signature photo montages—an approach he called "multiple-image photography": highly inventive, pre-Photoshop collages that he made by combining negatives in the darkroom. His work has received new attention with a pair of posthumous books: the well-reviewed 2015 publication of his Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie," and the 2021 collection of his behind-the-scenes photographs from the very first season of Sesame Street, "The Unseen Photos of Street Gang." He has been the subject of several solo exhibits in recent years, including a two-year retrospective at the Brooklyn Historical Society. One recent critic wrote that even decades later, "his explorations of photomontage remain durably inspired, innovative, and visually dynamic."
Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir is an autobiographical essay by Truman Capote about his life in Brooklyn in the late 1950s. While it was eventually combined with the original photo illustrations by David Attie in a coffee table edition, and has been included in anthologies as well, it was first published in the February 1959 issue of the mid-century travel magazine Holiday.
Marguerite Lamkin Brown Harrity Littman was an American-British socialite and HIV/AIDS activist. As a Southern American accent coach she is known to have coached actors including Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Littman is remembered for her role in HIV/AIDS advocacy, including fundraising for charities.
↑ A March 1968 interview with Playboy contains the following exchange:
Playboy: Would you elaborate on your comment that Holly was the prototype of today's liberated female and representative of a "whole breed of girls who live off men but are not prostitutes. They're our version of the geisha girl..."? Capote: Holly Golightly was not precisely a call girl. She had no job, but accompanied expense-account men to the best restaurants and night clubs, with the understanding that her escort was obligated to give her some sort of gift, perhaps jewelry or a check ... if she felt like it, she might take her escort home for the night. So these girls are the authentic American geishas, and they're much more prevalent now than in 1943 or 1944, which was Holly's era.
↑ Green, Penelope (November 6, 2020). "Marguerite Littman, the Inspiration for Holly Golightly, Dies at 90". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on November 7, 2020. Retrieved November 8, 2020. Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at midcentury, counted among her closest friends ... Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.'
↑ Rudisill, Marie; Simmons, James C. (1983). Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt who Helped to Raise Him. William Morrow. p.92.
↑ Sagolla, Lisa Jo (2003). The Girl who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. p.110. ISBN1-55553-573-9.
↑ Capote, Truman; Attie, David (2015). Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir: With the lost photographs of David Attie. New York: Little Bookroom. ISBN978-1936941117.
↑ Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. Harvard University Press. p.465. ISBN0-674-00590-2. ...he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's which will become a small classic.
↑ Davis, Deborah (2007). Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and his Black and White Ball. John Wiley and Sons. pp.141–142. ISBN978-0-470-09821-9.
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