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| Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. |
1,001 Novels A Library of America
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
by Truman Capote
the Upper East Side
New York: 29/105
Manhattan: 3/34
If you haven't started watching The Feud: Capote vs the Swans, this is your sign to start. Capote has endured as an iconic figure in American popular culture based on his combining a couple of monster hits with an early presence in the nascent celebrity culture that has dominated the world in subsequent decades. I re-read Breakfast at Tiffany's back in 2016 for the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project- here is the post I wrote back then:
Published 2/19/16
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly is one of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girls, she is even listed on the wikipedia table which contains examples. Audrey Hepburn played in her in her iconic turn in the movie version of the book, and it is fair to say that it some version of the picture above that leaps to mind when I think of Breakfast at Tiffany's, either film or book version. The book is a novella, maybe one hundred pages long. It's told from the perspective of "Fred" a Capote-esque narrator struggling as a writer in World War II era New York City. His downstairs neighbor is Holly Golightly, who like many other Manic Pixie Dream Girls is both irresistibly attractive to a wide variety of men, but who has more fraught relationships with members of her own gender. This characteristic of hers is manifested in the parties she throws in her apartment, which typically have only one female guest (Golightly).
Breakfast at Tiffany's has a reputation as being a work of light fiction, but the book is darker than that reputation. As is gradually revealed, Golightly is a former child bride from Arkansas, who fled her (admittedly not terrible under the circumstances) "probably illegal" wedding for Hollywood, then wound up in New York City. She is enmeshed in a conspiracy to allow a jailed mobster to run his rackets from inside Sing Sing. In the end, she flees indictment for South America, never to be seen again.
Capote was already famous before the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's, but his critical reputation wasn't truly cemented until after his magisterial true crime opus, In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood would also be his last decent book. Like his contemporary J.D. Salinger, the lack of finished works turns Capote into another mid century "What If", firmly ensconced in the canon as the result of one masterpiece and another less masterpiece, but not a top flight author for the ages.
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly is one of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girls, she is even listed on the wikipedia table which contains examples. Audrey Hepburn played in her in her iconic turn in the movie version of the book, and it is fair to say that it some version of the picture above that leaps to mind when I think of Breakfast at Tiffany's, either film or book version. The book is a novella, maybe one hundred pages long. It's told from the perspective of "Fred" a Capote-esque narrator struggling as a writer in World War II era New York City. His downstairs neighbor is Holly Golightly, who like many other Manic Pixie Dream Girls is both irresistibly attractive to a wide variety of men, but who has more fraught relationships with members of her own gender. This characteristic of hers is manifested in the parties she throws in her apartment, which typically have only one female guest (Golightly).
Breakfast at Tiffany's has a reputation as being a work of light fiction, but the book is darker than that reputation. As is gradually revealed, Golightly is a former child bride from Arkansas, who fled her (admittedly not terrible under the circumstances) "probably illegal" wedding for Hollywood, then wound up in New York City. She is enmeshed in a conspiracy to allow a jailed mobster to run his rackets from inside Sing Sing. In the end, she flees indictment for South America, never to be seen again.
Capote was already famous before the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's, but his critical reputation wasn't truly cemented until after his magisterial true crime opus, In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood would also be his last decent book. Like his contemporary J.D. Salinger, the lack of finished works turns Capote into another mid century "What If", firmly ensconced in the canon as the result of one masterpiece and another less masterpiece, but not a top flight author for the ages.
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