Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
Summary
An unnamed narrator, a young writer new to New York in 1943, becomes friends with Holly Golightly, the free spirited young woman living one floor below him in their Manhattan brownstone, who supports herself entirely through the company she keeps: dinners, nightclubs, cash gifts and fifty dollars for the powder room handed over by a rotating cast of wealthy men she calls, without much shame, her rats and super rats. Holly visits an imprisoned mobster named Sally Tomato every week for a hundred dollars, believing she is only carrying harmless weather reports to his lawyer, and grows serious about a wealthy Brazilian, Jose Ybarra Jaegar, planning to leave New York and her old life behind to marry him. When Sally Tomato's arrest exposes the messages Holly carried as coded instructions for a drug operation, Holly is arrested too, and Jose, unwilling to risk the scandal, abandons her by letter rather than stand by her. Out on bail, Holly releases her unnamed cat onto a rainy street corner rather than take him somewhere she cannot promise to stay, then leaves the country alone for South America before her case can go further. The narrator never sees her again, gets one brief postcard, and years later finds the cat, now with a home and a name of its own, in a window uptown, taking it as the only real evidence he ever gets that Holly might have found some kind of home herself.
Capote writes with a light, glancing touch even while circling real desperation underneath Holly's chatter, and the novella reads quickly and stays oddly melancholy under its wit; its refusal to give Holly and the narrator a romance, or to resolve where she ends up, is exactly what the famous film changed, and readers who know the movie first are often surprised by how open ended and sadder the book actually is.
Capote drew Holly from several women he knew, among them Marguerite Littman, and he wanted Marilyn Monroe, not Audrey Hepburn, to play her on screen.
Historical Context & Significance
Esquire ran Breakfast at Tiffany's in its November 1958 issue, after Harper's Bazaar had reportedly declined it as too racy for its readers, and Random House published the full book on October 28, 1958. No major literary prize took it up; Capote's next book, In Cold Blood, would earn him far more critical attention seven years later, but this one built its reputation through word of mouth among writers instead. Norman Mailer, an unlikely admirer of Capote generally, called him the most perfect writer of his generation over this book specifically, saying he would not have changed two words in it.
The 1961 film, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Audrey Hepburn, changed the novella's ending outright, giving the narrator and Holly a shared future the book deliberately withholds, and that softer version has shaped the story's popular image ever since even as the book itself keeps selling on its own, darker terms. Henry Mancini's score, including Moon River, became as famous as the film itself, and a 1966 Broadway musical adaptation closed during previews, one of the few attempts to retell Holly's story that never found an audience at all.