Breakfast at Tiffany’s is Capote’s third book I’ve read in years. Unfortunately, I don’t remember either, as I read Cold Blood and A Christmas Memoir long ago. However, I can say that Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my favourite book by the author. I tried so hard not to watch the film for years; I can say I did well. I thought it would be very different to watch the film after reading the book.
If we examine Breakfast at Tiffany’s superficially, it is about the party and glittering days of a young and beautiful woman in New York. When you go deeper, one realises the darkness under the lights. Holly Golightly, who spends every day in a different place with lots of fun, said, “I actually don’t have any friends”. It was one of the sentences that impressed me the most throughout the book.
The young writer candidate, who is in love with Holly and at the same time admires her and her way of living, is one of those who closely witnessed what such lives look like and what they actually are. Although Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a short book, it successfully relays many topics that would be covered in a long book with pleasure.
Oh, of course, there’s also a cute cat that I’m a fan of. At the end of the book, an event stole me away (don’t worry, nothing happens to the cat), and I thought about it for a long time. If you have a cat, I say hug it and read this book together. But please watch the film later. Enjoy!
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Truman Capote’s dazzling New York novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s that inspired the classic 1961 film starring Audrey Hepburn is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.
‘What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits…’
Meet Holly Golightly – a free spirited, lop-sided romantic girl about town. With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly is a style sensation wherever she goes. Her apartment rocks to Martini-soaked parties and she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate dream – to find a real life place like Tiffany’s that makes her feel at home.
Full of sharp wit and exuberant, larger-than-life characters which vividly capture the restless, madcap era of 1940s New York, Breakfast at Tiffany’s will make you fall in love, perhaps for the first time, with a book.
‘A master writer … makes the heart sing and the narrative fly’ withBreakfast at Tiffany’s.’ The New York Times
‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The most romantic story ever written’ Alex James, Guardian
‘One of the century’s greatest storytellers’ Independent on Sunday
Truman Capote
Truman Capote, original name Truman Streckfus Persons, (born September 30, 1924, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died August 25, 1984, Los Angeles, California), American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose early writing extended the Southern Gothic tradition, though he later developed a more journalistic approach in the novel In Cold Blood (1965; film 1967), which, together with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958; film 1961), remains his best-known work.
His parents were divorced when he was young, and he spent his childhood with various elderly relatives in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama. (He owed his surname to his mother’s remarriage, to Joseph Garcia Capote.) He attended private schools and eventually joined his mother and stepfather at Millbrook, Connecticut, where he completed his secondary education at Greenwich High School.
Capote drew on his childhood experiences for many of his early works of fiction. Having abandoned further schooling, he achieved early literary recognition in 1945 when his haunting short story “Miriam” was published in Mademoiselle magazine; the following year it won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the first of four such awards Capote was to receive.
His first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), was acclaimed as the work of a young writer of great promise. The book is a sensitive, partly autobiographical portrayal of a boy’s search for his father and his own sexual identity through a nightmarishly decadent Southern world.
The short story “Shut a Final Door” (O. Henry Award, 1946) and other tales of loveless and isolated individuals were collected in A Tree of Night, and Other Stories (1949). The quasi-autobiographical novel The Grass Harp (1951) is a story of nonconforming innocents who temporarily retire from life to a tree house, returning renewed to the real world.
One of Capote’s most popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a novella about Holly Golightly, a young fey café society girl; it was first published in Esquire magazine in 1958 and then as a book, with several other stories.
Capote’s increasing preoccupation with journalism was reflected in his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, a chilling account of the murders of four members of the Clutter family, committed in Kansas in 1959. Capote began researching the murders soon after they happened, and he spent six years interviewing the two men who were eventually executed for the crime. (That time included months spent in Kansas with his friend, childhood neighbour, and fellow novelist Harper Lee, who served as his “assistant researchist.”)
In Cold Blood first appeared as a series of articles in 1965 in The New Yorker; the book version was published that same year. Its critical and popular success pushed Capote to the forefront of the emerging New Journalism, and it proved to be the high point of his dual careers as a writer and a celebrity socialite. Endowed with a quirky but attractive character, he entertained television audiences with outrageous tales recounted in his distinctively high-pitched lisping Southern drawl.
Capote’s later writings never approached the success of his earlier ones. In the late 1960s he adapted two short stories about his childhood, “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” for television. The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Spaces (1973) consists of collected essays and profiles over a 30-year span, while the collection Music for Chameleons: New Writing (1980) includes both fiction and nonfiction. In later years Capote’s growing dependence on drugs and alcohol stifled his productivity.
Moreover, selections from a projected work that he considered to be his masterpiece, a social satire entitled Answered Prayers, appeared in Esquire in 1975–76 and raised a storm among friends and foes who were harshly depicted in the work (under the thinnest of disguises). He was thereafter ostracized by his former celebrity friends. The book, which had not been completed at the time of his death, was published as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel in 1986. Summer Crossing, a short novel that Capote wrote in the 1940s and that was believed lost, was published in 2006.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
