Walking New York
Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Walk along with New York’s most celebrated writers on a tour of the city that inspired them in this “evolving portrait of New York through the centuries” (The New York Observer).
ONE OF THE NEW YORK OBSERVER’S TOP 10 BOOKS FOR FALL
It’s no wonder that New York has always been a magnet city for writers. Manhattan is one of the most walkable cities in the world. But while many novelists, poets, and essayists have enjoyed long walks in New York, their experiences varied widely. Walking New York is a study of celebrated writers who walked the streets of New York and wrote about the city in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Though the writers were often irritated, disturbed, and occasionally shocked by what they saw on their walks, they were still fascinated by the city Cynthia Ozick called “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.” Returning to New York after an absence of two decades, Henry James loathed many things about “bristling” New York, while native New Yorker Walt Whitman both celebrated and criticized “Mannahatta” in his writings.
This idiosyncratic guidebook combines literary scholarship with urban studies to reveal how this crowded, dirty, noisy, and sometimes ugly city gave these “restless analysts” plenty of fodder for their craft. In Walking New York, you’ll see the city though the eyes of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Colson Whitehead, and Teju Cole.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This survey of writers' impressions of New York City on foot treads some fairly well-worn paths, though it's also suffused with an earnest appreciation for New York's pedestrian and literary heritage. Miller traces the footsteps of Charles Dickens through the slums of Five Points in the 1840s and the romantic exhortations of Walt Whitman, without neglecting more recent writers. Colson Whitehead, for instance, describes, in his essay collection The Colossus of New York, rambling in the city's "inscrutable hustle," while Teju Cole's novel Open City depicts a psychiatry resident who finds that daily peregrinations not only "help him think, but also keep his brooding under control." At times, Miller seems torn between providing context such as how Stephen Crane's sidewalk encounter with a prostitute irreparably damaged the writer's reputation and exploring his subjects' writing in depth. That being said, Miller has taken on an ambitious project and succeeded, up to a point. But since this is New York, after all, a minor success registers as a mild disappointment, for not every page can convey, as Elizabeth Hardwick did, the "wild electric beauty of New York, the marvelous excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops."
