A House on the Heights

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 1950s and 60s 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 Brooklyns "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 viewall rendered in Capotes deft and stylish prose.