An immense collection the Big Town, arguably still the most exciting city in the world.
It begins with Washington Irving contemplating the meaning of Manhattan and includes works of tens of the first- rate writers who have been influenced by the Big Town. It includes diaries, journals, letters, stories, poems, essays. Over one - hundred writers give their take on the City which Bellow once said includes every single human type and kind. It touches too upon the vast worlds of inner feeling , the effects the City has on the soul. So there is the lonely independent cry of 'Bartleby' 'I prefer not to' not far from the celebratory sound of Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'. It has the Broadway of Damon Runyan and the Lower East Side of Abraham Cahan.
Worlds within worlds , a true treasure for all those who know and love the big town.

The tale of New York City is one of the most interesting in world history. Starting as a humble colony by different European hands, it has emerged as the financial capital of the world in the past 100 years, symbolizing the dominance of the sole superpower in the world. Perhaps the ultimate melting pot, the city is home to among the most diverse populations in the planet.

"Writing New York: A Literary Anthology" captures the zeitgeist of this most modern of metropolises. A literary compendium of famous and not-so-famous, local and foreign authors give a representative view of the city in it's varied distinctions. The energy, loneliness, alienation, joy, triumph, success, failure, and unique culture of Gotham are adequately portrayed in this vast portrait.

Charting the course of the city's 200 years, the early efforts of Washington Irving and James Kirke Paulding give the reader some observations of the city in it's infancy. Antebellum accounts by foreign visitors like Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, and Fanny Kemble reveal the competitive and jaundiced eye representatives of the old world cast on the new with it's "great experiment". One of the marvels of this anthology is the glimpses of 19th-Century New York life, vividly shown in works like the excerpt from Nathaniel Parker Willis' "Open-Air Musings in the City"; the pressure of commercial-capitalist society in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; and everyday life in George G. Foster's "The Eating-Houses". The personal diaries of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong are fascinating accounts of the city from the eyes of prominent individuals who had the vantage point of observing their times within the upper echelons of New York society.

Of course, New York would not be completely represented without the diverse cultures and ethnic distinctions it is known for. The narrative of Wong Chin Foo on his personal travail in starting a Chinese newspaper in Victorian America is a humorous and painful account of the country's well-known dark past. The African-American experience is competently depicted in James Weldon Johnson's transparent prose and Langston Hughes' reminiscence of the Harlem Renaissance. Abraham Cahan describes the Jewish experience, while Bernardo Vega and Oscar Hijuelos chronicle the Latin side of the story with trademark verve and vivacity. And many more.

Not only is prose touched on, but other literary genres are adequately represented. Poetical giants as diverse as Walt Whitman, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Hart Crane call on their muse to evoke their paean's to the city. Essays depicting the city's various impressions on individuals like Stephen Graham and Vivian Gornick are rendered in memorable style.

Like most anthologies, the book has it's weaknesses. Worthily inclusive writings on New York by E.B. White, Federico Garcia Lorca, Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Andy Warhol, etc., are not included. The quality of the writing dips towards the end, where the writers of that period seem to be more content with the common than the inspired, though the writing picks up at the close with such memorable works like Elizabeth Hardwick's dream-like "Sleepless Nights".

One of the purposes of an anthology is to introduce readers to works or artists whom one has never heard. In the erudite editing of native New Yorker Philip Lopate, I am fortunate to have come across classic texts like Willa Cather's lovely "Coming, Aphrodite!"; Weldon Kees' haunting "Robinson" poems; John McNulty's delightful tales of common day to day life; and Lewis Mumford's unforgettable depiction of an epiphany at the Brooklyn Bridge in "Sketches from Life". Reading this comprehensive and handsome tome is a documentary, a literary experience on the life of a living metropolis.