THE NEW YORK OBSERVER: ONE OF THE 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. While
many novelists, poets, and essayists have enjoyed long walks in New
York, not all of them have had favorable impressions. Addressing an
endlessly appealing subject, Walking New York is a study of twelve
American writers and several British writers who walked the streets
of New York and wrote about their impressions of the city in
fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Seen through 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,
almost all the works in Walking New York are about Manhattan, with
only Whitman and Kazin writing about Brooklyn. Though the writers
were often irritated, disturbed, and occasionally shocked by what
they saw on their walks, they were still fascinated by the city
William Dean Howells called "splendidly and sordidly commercial"
and Cynthia Ozick called "faithfully inconstant, magnetic,
man-made, unnatural-the synthetic sublime." In this idiosyncratic
guidebook to New York, celebrated writers ruminate on questions
that are still hotly debated to this day: the pros and cons of
capitalism and the impact of immigration. Many imply that New York
is a bewildering text that is hard to make sense of. 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. Combining literary scholarship with urban studies,
Walking New York reveals how this crowded, dirty, noisy, and
sometimes ugly city gave these "restless analysts" plenty of fodder
for their craft.
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