Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. In it, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor, Holly Golightly, who is one of Capote’s best-known creations. In 1961 it was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name.
Setting
The novella is set in 1940s New York, specifically the Upper East Side, in a brownstone apartment. An area that experienced many changes following the Civil War, it went through its most major shift at the turn of the century. Broadly speaking, brownstones (the type of building that Holly lives in) were rebranded as more «stylish» places to live, rather than being thought of as decrepit and outdated buildings. By the 1940s, it had become a fairly affluent area. The novella’s setting plays a great role in the plot; various wealthy characters from the Upper East Side come in and out of Holly Golightly’s life.
Though the novella does not take place in the American South, there are mentions of it later in the novella: We follow Golightly’s life in Manhattan for the entirety of the novella, but she was actually born in Texas, a place that she was desperate to escape.
Plot
In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator befriends 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».
As the novella opens, we are introduced to an unnamed narrator who reflects back on his friendship with Holly Golightly. Another old friend, Joe Bell, reaches out to the narrator because he believes a wood carving that he has come across depicts Golightly. We can assume many years have passed, as the carving is said to be from 1956.
The narrator recalls the specific night he meets Holly. She climbs through his window in order to escape the man that came home with her that night. She mentions the resemblance the narrator has to her brother, Fred, and asks if she can call him that. As they continue to talk, Holly realizes it is Thursday, and explains to the narrator that she visits a prisoner, Sally Tomato, every Thursday in exchange for $100.
We are introduced to a slew of characters that are constantly coming in and out of Holly’s apartment. During this scene, she strikes up a conversation with our narrator about how Tiffany’s is the only place that calms her when she’s feeling anxious or overwhelmed. The title is attributed to this scene.
The narrator and Holly’s friendship develops, but they feud over a trifling matter. However, when the narrator suspects Holly is being watched, he decides it may be right to break the feud to warn her about this person. He is confronted by the man who has been watching her. The man tells the narrator of Holly’s past. He divulges that she was born Lulamae Barnes, and that he is her husband, Doc Golightly. Doc tries to persuade her to come back to Texas with him, but she insists she must stay in New York. They part ways.
Holly finds out her brother has died in the war and this sends her into an emotional down spiral. She eventually strikes up a relationship with a character named Jose Ybarra-Jaegar and plans to move to Brazil with him.
Eventually, Holly’s visits to the prison draw suspicion and she is arrested after further evidence unveils that Sally Tomato was running a drug ring. Jose sends her a letter explaining that he does not see a future with her because of her arrest. After getting out on bail, she plans to leave and go to Brazil without Jose. Before leaving, she sets her cat loose—the cat that she had never given a name. The narrator receives a brief note from her, but hears nothing else. He hopes, though, she has found a place that feels like home.
Characters
The unnamed narrator-writer: a writer who relates his memories of Holly Golightly, the people in her life, and his relationship with her.
Holiday (Holly) Golightly: downstairs neighbor and center of attention of the writer’s memoirs.
Joe Bell: A bartender acquainted with both the writer and Holly.
Mag Wildwood: Holly’s friend and sometime roommate, a fellow socialite and model.
Rusty Trawler: A presumably wealthy man, thrice divorced, well known in society circles.
José Ybarra-Jaegar: A Brazilian diplomat, who is the companion of Mag Wildwood and, later, of Holly.
Doc Golightly: A veterinarian from Texas, whom Holly married as a teenager.
O. J. Berman: A talent agent from Hollywood, who has discovered Holly and groomed her to become a professional actress.
Salvatore «Sally» Tomato: A convicted racketeer, whom Holly visits weekly in Sing Sing prison.
Madame Sapphia Spanella: Another tenant in the brownstone.
Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi: A Japanese photographer, who lives in the top floor studio apartment of the brownstone.
Conception
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, actress 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. A November 2020 obituary in The New York Times states that the main inspiration for Holly was socialite Marguerite Littman.
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.
According to the biographer of Joan McCracken, McCracken had a violent dressing room outburst after learning of the wartime death of her brother, while she was appearing in the play Bloomer Girl (1944). McCracken’s biographer suggests that Capote was inspired by this event as a model for a scene in which Holly reacts to her brother’s death overseas. McCracken and her husband Jack Dunphy were close friends of Capote, and Dunphy became Capote’s life companion after his 1948 divorce from McCracken. In the novella, Holly Golightly is also depicted singing songs from Oklahoma! (in which McCracken appeared) accompanying herself on a guitar, and owning The Baseball Guide, which was edited by McCracken’s uncle.
Publication history
Breakfast at Tiffany’s was originally sold to Harper’s Bazaar for $2,000 and intended for publication in its July 1958 issue. It was to be illustrated with a big series of photo montages by David Attie, who had been hired for the job by Harper’s art director Alexey Brodovitch. However, after the publication was scheduled, longtime Harper’s editor Carmel Snow was ousted by the magazine’s publisher, the Hearst Corporation, and Hearst executives began asking for changes to the novella’s tart language.
By this time, Attie’s montages had been completed, and Alice Morris, the fiction editor of Harper’s, recounted that while Capote initially refused to make any changes, he relented «partly because I showed him the layouts… six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs». Yet Hearst ordered Harper’s not to run the novella anyway. Its language and subject matter were still deemed «not suitable», and there was concern that Tiffany’s, a major advertiser, would react negatively.
An outraged Capote soon resold the work to Esquire for $3,000 ($42,200 today); by his own account, he specified that he «would not be interested if Esquire did not use Attie’s original series of photographs». He wrote to Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills, «I’m very happy that you are using Attie’s pictures, as I think they are excellent.» But to his disappointment, Esquire ran just one full-page image of Attie’s (another was later used as the cover of at least one paperback edition of the novella).
Attie’s photo was the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly—who is seen laughing and smiling in a nightclub. The novella appeared in the November 1958 issue. Shortly afterward, a collection of the novella and three short stories by Capote was published by Random House — and the glowing reviews caused sales of the Esquire issue to skyrocket. Both Attie and Brodovitch went on to work with Capote on other projects – Attie on Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir, and Brodovitch on Observations, both published in 1959.
In 2021, Esquire re-ran the novella online, reuniting the text with many of Attie’s original images.
The collection has been reprinted several times with the other short stories, «House of Flowers», «A Diamond Guitar» and «A Christmas Memory». The novella itself has been included in other Capote collections.
Capote’s original typed manuscript was offered for sale by
