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
Devotion (novella) hard-edged analysis of the act of writing". Dickstein wrote: "The spare abstract quality of Strauss's language is the reflection of his subject: the isolation of the self/artist in a world where no one really listens. While some readers will prefer the more richly furnished world of a novelist like V.S. Naipaul, this book by Botho Strauss is like a sculpture by Giacometti—clean, pared-down, and without a shred of unnecessary flesh." Devotion (novella) Devotion () is a 1977 novella by the German writer Botho Strauß. It tells the story of a Berlin bookseller in his early 30s who is abandoned by