Bonnie Golightly
Bonnie Golightly (1919-1998) grew up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where she owned a used bookstore and lived among a group of artists and writers. Golightly published twenty books, including the novels The Wild One, Beat Girl, and The Integration of Maybelle Brown; movie novelizations, some under pseudonyms; and books about the paranormal and sexuality. She is famous for claiming, in a failed lawsuit, that Truman Capote based the character of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on her. These new paperback editions contain a rare profile of Bonnie Golightly based on an extensive interview shortly before her death.
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In Bonnie Golightly’s 1959 novel Beat Girl, Chloe Longtree, a quick-witted, wealthy, seventeen-year-old orphan, sets out to establish herself in New York City. Confident but vulnerable, she searches from the Upper East Side to Greenwich Village for “Beautiful People.” The deception and disappointment she encounters, although harsh, are steps toward empowerment in this poignant and funny work.
The Wild One by Bonnie Golightly is a 1957 novel about a sensitive, perceptive teenager from a wealthy family—her father dead and her mother a dying alcoholic—who falls in and out of love with older men as she seeks to understand her developing identity. Poignant, funny, and captivating, The Wild One has been compared with Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and deserves a new and broader audience.
In the 1960 novel The Intimate Ones, Bonnie Golightly delves into the slowly unraveling lives of three young New York City grifters with biting humor, deep insight, and striking empathy, particularly for the societal cruelty toward young women. This edition of The Intimate Ones contains a rare profile of Bonnie Golightly based in part on an extensive interview conducted with her shortly before her death.
Nine years married, a wife suspects she is pregnant while a husband suspects he is about to be fired after a corporate takeover. In this novelization of the 1958 film The High Cost of Loving, Bonnie Golightly invests a screwball-comedy plot with authentic emotions of marital joys and frustrations and big-business cruelty.