A country girl remade into a Manhattan somebody, running from something she won't name.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A runaway reinvented as Holly Golightly enchants a Manhattan neighbor who can never quite discover what she's fleeing.
170g
Weighs the same as Phone
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction
Forget the movie. Truman Capote's Holly Golightly on the page is more desperate, sad, and wild than the one Hollywood softened — a country girl remade into a Manhattan somebody, running from something she won't name. As told by a neighbor in a brownstone who fell under her spell, this is a masterclass in American prose: sparkling, bittersweet, and incredibly light on its feet. To read the literary Holly is to remember that we are all just travelers trying to find a place where we feel safe.
Field notes
Capote originally sold Breakfast at Tiffany's to Harper's Bazaar, which commissioned an elaborate photographic spread to accompany it. But the magazine's publisher balked at Holly's sexual independence and reportedly feared offending Tiffany's, a major advertiser. Capote took the novella to Esquire, where it appeared in 1958. Capote's heroine emerged at a moment when a woman could reinvent herself in Manhattan, provided she didn't become too explicit about how she paid for it.