A house on the heights - Truman Capote

Truman Capote spent several years in the 1950s and 1960s in Brooklyn Heights, once telling a reporter: "It's the only place to live in New York." George Plimpton writes that "a love of history, gossip, character, and a skill at putting all this to words...brings Brooklyn Heights to life as vividly as any landscape Truman ever undertook to survey." Long out of print, Truman Capote's evocative essay on Brooklyn Heights brings to life the landscape that was for the author a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, of mysterious warehouses and menacing street thugs, of antiques and dowagers, a garden overhung with wisteria, and the famous Esplanade-all rendered in his deft and stylish prose and with obvious affection for the neighborhood. Originally commissioned for Holiday magazine in the late 1950s by John Knowles (later the author of A Separate Peace), the essay remained one of his favorites-especially its surprise ending.