In his personal correspondence, Capote acknowledged that he intended his charismatic and unscrupulous heroine as a composite portrait of a number of Manhattan socialites with whom he enjoyed intimate friendships, including Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus, and Oona O’Neill. The author’s idea for Holly Golightly, who, in the first drafts of the manuscript, was named "Connie Gustafson", likely came from several sources. The title Breakfast at Tiffany’s is drawn from an anecdote popular among Capote’s social circle about an ignorant out-of-towner who, upon being asked which glamorous New York restaurant he would like to visit, answered, "Well, let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s". Capote culled inspiration for his new work from gossip, personal experience, and the lives of his eccentric New York friends. The simple, linear narrative of Breakfast at Tiffany’s provided Capote with the perfect vehicle to refine his characteristically minimal, naturalistic prose style, marking the novella as a transition phase between the author’s more elaborate earlier writings and the documentary-style realism of his next major work, the non-fiction masterpiece In Cold Blood.Ĭapote composed Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the spring of 1958, shortly after the publication of the critically well-received Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first full-length novel and a commercial success. Set in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, during the final years of World War II, it documents the story of a young writer’s fascination with, and affection for, his charming and troubled neighbor, the unorthodox Holly Golightly. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.īreakfast at Tiffany’s is Truman Capote’s best-loved work of fiction and arguably one of the finest American novellas. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in The New Yorker (The Duke in His Domain and The Muses Are Heard), a true-crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memoirs about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass Harp and House of Flowers) and two films (Beat the Devil and The Innocents).
His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America’s postwar generation. Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924.
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