Summer at Tiffany and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more

Buy New

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime Free Trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn More
Buy Used
Used - Good See details
$3.25 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
Kindle Edition
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Summer at Tiffany
 
 
Start reading Summer at Tiffany on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Summer at Tiffany [Hardcover]

Marjorie Hart (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)

List Price: $15.99
Price: $11.71 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $4.28 (27%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Only 8 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).
Want it delivered Friday, February 3? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition --  
Hardcover $11.71  
Paperback $11.04  
Unknown Binding --  
Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged $17.95 or Free with Audible 30-day free trial

Book Description

April 3, 2007

Do you remember the best summer of your life?

New York City, 1945. Marjorie Jacobson and her best friend, Marty Garrett, arrive fresh from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa hoping to find summer positions as shopgirls. Turned away from the top department stores, they miraculously find jobs as pages at Tiffany & Co., becoming the first women to ever work on the sales floor—a diamond-filled day job replete with Tiffany blue shirtwaist dresses from Bonwit Teller's—and the envy of all their friends.

Hart takes us back to the magical time when she and Marty rubbed elbows with the rich and famous; pinched pennies to eat at the Automat; experienced nightlife at La Martinique; and danced away their weekends with dashing midshipmen. Between being dazzled by Judy Garland's honeymoon visit to Tiffany, celebrating VJ Day in Times Square, and mingling with Café society, she fell in love, learned unforgettable lessons, made important decisions that would change her future, and created the remarkable memories she now shares with all of us.


Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with New York: Portrait Of A City $44.09

Summer at Tiffany + New York: Portrait Of A City
  • This item: Summer at Tiffany

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • New York: Portrait Of A City

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details



Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the age of 82, Hart, a professional cellist, recalls 1945, when she and her best friend, Marty, students at the University of Iowa, spent the summer in Manhattan, in this pleasant but slight memoir. Failing to obtain work at Lord & Taylor, the pair, self-described as long-limbed, blue-eyed blondes, were hired at Tiffany's—the first female floor sales pages, delivering packages to the repair and shipping department, for $20 a week. Hart details their stringent budget ("1. Two nickels for subway. 2. Sandwich at the Automat: 15 cents") and describes, somewhat breathlessly, what a thrill it was to see such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland shop at the fabled store. Her romance with a midshipman, the combat death of her cousin, the news of the dropping of the first atomic bomb and a vivid account of the celebration in Times Square after Japan's surrender convey a sense of the WWII era, but without adding much illumination. She does, however, evoke New York City as seen through the eyes of two innocent smalltown girls. 16 pages of b&w photos and illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Although the country is still at war, Manhattan during the summer of 1945 is an intoxicating place, especially for two fresh-faced young coeds who step off a train from Iowa armed with little more than their youthful exuberance and the name of a very influential contact. The combination is enough to land Marjorie and her best friend, Marty, jobs as pages at the prestigious Tiffany & Co., making them the first female employees ever to work the sales floor. From this groundbreaking vantage point, the girls see and do it all, from assisting notorious gangsters and international playboys at the jewelry counters, to rubbing elbows with celebrities at the city's legendary nightclubs, to glimpsing General Eisenhower during his triumphant victory parade, to kissing soldiers in Times Square on V-J Day. Remarkably, this winsome memoir was written 60 years after that giddy summer spent pinching pennies and dreaming of diamonds, yet Hart's infectious vivacity resonates with a madcap immediacy, delectably capturing the city's heady vibrancy and a young girl's guileless enchantment. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (April 3, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061189529
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061189524
  • Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #607,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marjorie Hart was born in Story City, Iowa, graduated from the University of Iowa and received a M.A from San Diego State University. She taught at DePauw University and the University of San Diego and retired Professor Emerita. As a cellist, she was a member of the San Diego Symphony. Her memoir, Summer at Tiffany, became a New York Times Bestseller.

 

Customer Reviews

70 Reviews
5 star:
 (45)
4 star:
 (19)
3 star:
 (5)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (70 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, it only makes me want to know more, April 19, 2007
By 
Kate "kalohe" (Apex, NC, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Summer at Tiffany (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful piece of history combined with a great story about young women having an adventure in New York City. I love the things that get left out of her letters home. It could be fiction as easily as biography. She's a really nice writer. You get a sense of life in a tight-knit Iowa town. I would really like to see more from Ms Hart about life in that area, that era. It's all so different from what kids are living today and at that same time some of the problems are the same. And so rich in history. I'm really not expressing myself well. I will recommend it for my 18 year old daughter who will be off to college in the fall, and to my sister who is a writer and critical of anything sloppily written (she won't have complaints about this one) and to my dad, who lived all of this from a different prospective, having grown up in Washington DC and having spent the war years in Hawaii and the Pacific.

Even if I didn't write the review well, Ms Hart wrote the book beautifully. I started it last night, and didn't get anything else done until I finished it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Coming to Manhattan with little money and one secondhand reference takes great bravery and pluck..., May 30, 2007
By 
Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Summer at Tiffany (Hardcover)
Coming to Manhattan with little money and one secondhand reference takes great bravery and pluck, particularly in war-torn America in 1945. Images from movies and the grand sweeping melodies of standard tunes of the era provide Marjorie Hart and her best friend Marty with a jumping-off point as tourists. But as they make do with what little they've brought with them, they end up becoming bonafide New Yorkers for a summer that ends triumphantly with love all around and a VJ Day celebration in Times Square.

The details of the time, the mores and concerns of a young lady in this pre-women's-lib period, are wrought quite skillfully and imaginatively by Hart, a first-time memoirist. A cellist by trade, she never lets go of either her Iowa good sense or her little girl's love of all things romantic and exciting. So she becomes a first-rate tour guide through a New York that remains only between Trump-sized towers and well-known chain stores. The drama --- for example, of saving enough CHANGE to take public transportation each day (a nickel!) or trying to figure out what kind of drink to order in an elegant cafe you've read about in movie magazines your whole life --- is small but never really quaint. There is enough in Hart's experiences for even the most jaded techno-kid of this age to find some commonalities between that world and today's.

But it is the girls' experiences in Tiffany & Co. that make the book what it is. After Marty brazenly drags Marjorie into the store and, using a reference that may or may not come through, more or less demands jobs for them --- making them the first female pages in the history of Tiffany --- their lives take a dramatic and fantastic upswing. Living amongst the rich and famous, if only from 9 to 5, gives the girls a lot to talk about and introduces them both to the sweet side of serious money and the not-so-nice side (gangsters buying jewels with ill-begotten booty gives them the creeps yet proves exciting at the same time).

The other denizens of the floors --- including the secret third floor of Pearls and Diamonds(!), lifers who act like butlers out of an Evelyn Waugh book, and an elevator man direct from a Damon Runyan play --- are wonderfully represented. They provide a safe and secure environment for the girls to learn the ropes of this high-price business, as well as pointers on life that they take to heart. In these passages, Hart's direct prose sparkles like the glow of the famous Tiffany diamond.

The war creates an interesting context for all this movie-magazine madness. The girls meet enlisted men at Barnard dances and must endure the painful news from home when someone they know goes MIA or comes home in a body bag from the war. When a warplane accidentally hits the Empire State Building, Hart writes about the experience of the city in its aftermath so intensely that it almost could be mistaken for a description of 9/11. New York and World War II, atomic bombs and young love all meld together to offset the high-society hijinks of Tiffany, giving SUMMER AT TIFFANY a weight that grounds it in reality while still allowing us the enjoyment of living vicariously through those for whom it is not as daily a concern.

Hart never came back to New York after that summer. Although offered an opportunity to stay on the East Coast and study cello at Yale, she returned to Iowa and became a music educator as well as a musician out west. But her experiences in Manhattan that long-ago summer made some serious indentations on her life card, and she displays great heart in reliving and recounting for us a very special part of her own history and the history of the United States.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Summer at Tiffany, April 23, 2007
By 
This review is from: Summer at Tiffany (Hardcover)
The story of Summer at Tiffany is just as cute as the gorgeous book cover portrays! This is a quick, easy read that highlights a summer Marjorie Hart spent in NCY during college with her friend Marty during the late 1940's. The pages take you back to a charming and magical era, when shopping at a department store was an elegant experience. The fun times that Marjorie has are all captured in an easy to read and well written manner. This was a feel good book and one I will look forward to re-reading again. Highly recommended!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews











Only search this product's reviews



Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
watch counter, studio couch, old black magic
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Fifth Avenue, Story City, Fifty-seventh Street, Empire State Building, President Moore, Des Moines, Miss Jacobson, Times Square, Long Island, Miss Marjorie, Stork Club, Carnegie Hall, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Carl Byoir, Harry Richman, Iowa State, Morningside Drive, President Roosevelt, University of Iowa, Checker Cab, Four Hundred, Greenwich Village, Hudson River
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:


Books on Related Topics (learn more)


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums





Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject