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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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 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.