When Writers Fall in Love with Cities

A Book Review for An Anthology


However I believe that" Writing New York City" is more than a literary anthology, but this is a name which is chosen by its writer: Phillip Lopate. He is is the author of many essays such as Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, and the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. He also has worked as an editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, the Library of America's Writing New York, and the series editor of The Art of the Essay. His film criticism appears regularly in The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. This post is my review on this book.

Writing New York City

However, New York City was not always a big city, but now it is too big and complicated a city to be described well by just one writer. Writers who have lived in New York for some time have written some lines describing it, and Phillip Lopate, the editor of this book, has tried to collect them in Writing New York City.
Phillip Lopate , in book's preface, noted that “many popular American writers who are not necessarily from New York have a phase of this city in their collection. According to many, no one is able to describe this city within literary texts such as novels, diaries, and poems, for example as James Joyce has done regarding Dublin” (xvii). He mentioned that “New York's essence, literary or otherwise, grows out of the street experience” (xvii). Streets are a main concept in literary works which are about New York. Lopate gives an example in this way from Henry Miller. As he noted, “In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature” (xviii)
It can be said that Walt Whitman had a great impact on describing the city, particularly on peripatetic poets such as Frank O’ Hara. In addition, as Lopate states, “ some of best novelists, such as E.L.Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Oscar Hijuelos, have invested considerable energy in stories about the New York of their youth” (xxii).
This anthology includes 132 texts that collected materials can be categorized thus:
1. The literary descriptions and explanations of New York City.
2. Poems
3. Diaries
4. Historical fictions and autobiographical writings.
Finally, Lopate has concluded that “the making of anthologies is a hard activity” (xxii); especially when you try to do it about New York. He says: “it has not been possible, for example, to include excerpts from all the great novels about New York” (xxii).




Lopate, Philip, ed. Writing New York City. New York: Publication of the Library of America, 2008.