Breakfast at Tiffany's (novella) debt to Christopher Isherwood, one of his mentors, in creating the character of Holly Golightly: ""Breakfast at Tiffany's" is in many ways Capote's personal crystallization of Isherwood's Sally Bowles." Truman Capote's aunt, Marie Rudisill notes that Holly is a kindred spirit of Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, the central character of his short story "Children on Their Birthdays". She observes that both characters are "unattached, unconventional wanderers, dreamers in pursuit of some ideal of happiness." Capote himself acknowledged that Golightly was the favorite of his characters. The novella's prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote "the most perfect writer of
Truman Capote and who was "out." Despite the assertion earlier in life that one "lost an IQ point for every year spent on the West Coast", he purchased a home in Palm Springs and began to indulge in a more aimless lifestyle and heavy drinking. This resulted in bitter quarreling with Dunphy, with whom he had shared a nonexclusive relationship since the 1950s. Their partnership changed form and continued as a nonsexual one, and they were separated during much of the 1970s. Capote never finished another novel after "In Cold Blood." The dearth of new prose and other failures, including a rejected