Breakfast at Tiffany's (novella)
First edition cover
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| Author | Truman Capote |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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1958 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and paperback), e-book, audio-CD |
| Pages | 179 pp |
| OCLC | 964700 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3505.A59 A6 1993 |
Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. The main character, Holly Golightly, is one of Capote's best-known creations.
In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator becomes friends with 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."
Holly likes to shock people with carefully selected tidbits from her personal life or her outspoken viewpoints on various topics. Over the course of a year, she slowly reveals herself to the narrator, who finds himself fascinated by her curious lifestyle.
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", including socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, Oona O'Neill, writer/actress Carol Grace, writer Maeve Brennan, writer Doris Lilly, model Dorian Leigh (whom Capote dubbed "Happy Go Lucky"), and her sister, model Suzy Parker.
Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke wrote "half the women he knew...claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine." Clarke also wrote of the similarities between the author himself and the character. 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. 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.
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