Brooklyn ─ A Personal Memoir: With the Lost Photographs of David Attie

In 2001, The Little Bookroom published Truman Capote's long-out-of-print homage to Brooklyn,A House in the Heights. In 2014, more than fifty years after they were taken, the original photographs commissioned to illustrate the piece have been discovered by the photographer's son. Also found among the negatives were portraits of Capote taken on that same day; none of the photos have ever been published. Now, in a new edition with a new title,Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir With the lost photographs of David Attie, the words and images will be united for the first time.

The images of Brooklyn provide a stunning and atmospheric visual portrait of the city in 1959--its building, shops, street life, lost moments-- a Brooklyn at once strangely familiar yet largely vanished: horse-drawn wagons delivering produce to housewives, kids swimming in the East River and getting into mischief on the docks, dimly-lit bars, vintage signs, little girls jumping rope, bricklayers, barbers, neighborhood characters, all set against a backdrop of period architecture, that spectacular bridge, and the skyline of Manhattan.

The essay itself 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, a garden overhung with wisteria, and the famous Promenade and waterfront--all rendered in his deft and stylish prose. Originally commissioned for Holiday magazine by John Knowles (later the author of A Separate Peace), the piece remained one of his favorites--especially its surprise ending.
At the time, George Plimpton wrote that in the essay, Capote's "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." David Attie's photos enhance that landscape in a breathtaking way.

Truman Capote (1924-1984), the novelist, journalist, and celebrated man-about-town, is best known as the author ofOther Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's, andIn Cold Blood.

David Attie (1920-1980) was a commercial and fine art photographer, whose work was widely published in magazines and books. Attie began his photographic career as a student and protege of influentialHarper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who had similarly mentored the careers of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Brodovitch gave Attie his first professional assignment, which was to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Capote's latest work, Breakfast at Tiffany's, for Harper's; the project was scuttled after Capote got into a dispute with the magazine. Attie's commercial work was prolific and wide-ranging - including frequent covers and spreads forVogue, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Harper's; portraits of everyone from Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansbury, to Leonard Bernstein, Ralph Ellison and The Band; and his own books of photographs, 1977'sRussian Self-Portraits, and 1981's Portrait: Theory (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and others).

Eli Attie is a writer, producer, and former political operative. He served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and then as Vice President Al Gore's chief White House and campaign speechwriter through Gore's concession of the 2000 presidential election, which Attie and Gore wrote together. Attie was a longtime writer on both the NBC-TV seriesThe West Wing and the Fox-TV series House. Attie grew up in New York City. He is a graduate of Hunter College High School and Harvard College and lives in Los Angeles.

George Plimpton (1927-2003), the originator of "participatory journalism," was the editor of theParis Review. His books include Paper Lion, Out of My League,The Bogey Man, Open Net, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, andThe X Factor.