A House on the Heights »

When Truman Capote debuted on the New York literary scene in 1948, no one had seen anything quite like him. Capote soon became famous for his intensely readable and nuanced short stories, novels, and novellas, but he was equally famous as a personality, gadfly, and bon vivant -- not to mention as a crime writer. Capote s much-imitated 1965 book, In Cold Blood, all but invented the narrative true-crime genre.

The tranquil life he led in the quiet enclave of Brooklyn Heights stood in sharp contrast to the glittering scene he adored on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, but for a few years in the 1950's and '60's, Truman Capote happily made his home in a yellow brick house on Willow Street. By turns wistful and farcical, A House on the Heights vividly evokes a neighborhood Capote described as among Brooklyn's "splendid contradictions," a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, of mysterious warehouses and cartoonish street thugs, of antiques and dowagers, a broad yard overhung with wisteria, and the famous Esplanade with its incomparable view—all rendered in Capote's deft and stylish prose.