Literary Site Type: Historical Site

Truman Capote lived in the basement apartment of 70 Willow Street for ten years, which he rented from his friend Oliver Smith. While living there, he finished Breakfast at Tiffany’s and wrote the novel In Cold Blood. Capote’s essay “A House in the Heights” includes the quote, “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.”

Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, lived at 91 Remsen Street from 1924 to 1925 with his second wife, June. In Plexus, book two of the fictionalized account of his early life, he describes searching for and finding the apartment and his worries about paying the rent: “It was a stunning place she had to rent, but far beyond our means...I was convinced that if we took it, we’d be sunk.” After a year, the couple was evicted for failure to pay rent.

On the corner of Montague Terrace and Montague Street is the brownstone where W. H. Auden lived from October 1939 to September 1940. A plaque on the house notes that the poet wrote the long philosophical poem “New Year Letter” at this address. Just two doors south at 5 Montague Terrace is the home where novelist Thomas Wolfe lived just years earlier than Auden, in two rooms on the fourth floor, from 1933 to 1935. It is there that Wolfe wrote Of Time and the River before moving. Look for the plaque commemorating Wolfe between the windows to the left of the door.

The White Horse Tavern was made famous by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as the bar where he drank his last whiskey. Inside, portraits of Dylan Thomas adorn the walls, and a plaque commemorating him hangs above the bar. In the 1950s and 1960s, many more literary figures were drawn to the bar, including Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.