New York
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By Joan Brodsky Schur
On old buildings and apartment houses throughout New York City you will find plaques that proudly memorialize the residence of one famous writer after another. Not all of these writers were born in New York; in fact, few of them were. But then as now, New York City has attracted writers from all parts of America.
They came in part to support themselves. By 1825, New York City published more magazines than any other U.S. city. By the 1830's, thirty-five "penny presses" churned out newspapers. While the number of magazine and newspaper publishers have greatly declined since then, New York remains "Book Country" harboring the greatest number of book publishers in America. All of these enterprises have provided, and continue to provide, jobs for writers.
Some found New York City a stimulus for remembering youths spent in the rural heartland of America, as did
Mark Twain (1835-1910) in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Willa Cather (1873-1947) in My Ántonia. Henry James (1843-1916) and Edith Wharton (1862-1937), both born here, wrote about the wealthy New York elite (amongst whom they had grown up) in books like Washington Square and The House of Mirth. Others, like Stephen Crane (1871-1900), and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) came to denounce the degradation and poverty they found here—Crane in his famous novel Maggie: A Girl of the Street and Dreiser in the final chapters of Sister Carrie . Today writers are drawn by the opportunities to write for the Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, to teach at writing workshops offered by universities, and to read from their poetry and fiction at public readings.
Early History
Relative to other states, New York's publishing history began early. John Peter Zenger (1697-1746) won the right to publish articles that criticized public officials, paving the way
for freedom of the press in the colonies. As a journalist and poet, Philip Freneau (1752-1832) extended the democratic ideals of the new nation through his literary efforts. With publication of The Last of the Mohicans
,
Mid-19th Century
By the middle of the 19th century, New York City was well established as the nation's publishing capital and as such, it provided a place to work for many of America's greatest writers including
Post World War I Era and Modernism
In the years following World War I, America became an increasingly urban and modern society. As portrayed by
Harlem attracted both the African American elite as well as the many southern migrants heading north in the years of the Great Migration. The Harlem Renaissance burst forth with creative talent on the American scene throughout the 1920's and into the 1930's. Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the only Harlem Renaissance writer to have been born here.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) arrived in New York in 1921 to study at Columbia University, while Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) began her studies of folk culture at Barnard College. Hughes' poem "Harlem" begins, "What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?" — a line which Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) later took as the title of her play, the first Broadway play written by an African American woman.Jamaican-born
Claude McKay (1889-1948) worked in New York as an editor and published the first major work of the Harlem Renaissance, his anthology of poems titled Harlem Shadows. Richard Wright (1908-1960) arrived in New York City in 1927 and would later write his American classic Native Son here. Later African American authors include Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) who took Harlem as his setting for Invisible Man, as did James Baldwin (1924-1987) in Go Tell it on the Mountain.Like so many of New York City's artistic enclaves, the Harlem Renaissance drew together writers, artists, musicians and political activists, as did Greenwich Village on Manhattan's southern end. The Village attracted many poets, including e.e.cummings (1894-1962), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Hart Crane (1899-1932) whose poem "To Brooklyn Bridge" echoes Whitman's in a more modern key. The playwright Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) produced his early plays at the famed Provincetown Players beginning in 1916. Novelists also found Greenwich Village congenial. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) arrived in 1923 and
James Agee (1909-1955) in 1932.In midtown another group of writers was drawn to the city by the opportunity to write reviews and stories for magazines that captured the literary limelight, foremost among them were the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In the 1920's they gathered to display their wit and urbane sensibilities at the Algonquin Round Table. They included writers Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and New York-born
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967). In the following decades, John Cheever (1912-1982), James Thurber (1894-1961) and E.B White (1899-1985) all wrote for the New Yorker.New York and the Immigrant Mosaic
Between 1880 and 1919, 17 million immigrants entered the United States through New York
City. Perhaps it was a fitting welcome that they were greeted not only by the Statue of Liberty, but by the words of poet Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) imprinted on its base: "Give me
your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…"
From the hardships endured by many Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants in the slums of the Lower East Side, some found solace in writing about their experiences, while others found an outlet for their anger. Among the portrayals of immigrant Jewish life are Low Company by Daniel Fuchs (b.1909), Jews Without Money by Michael Gold (1894-1967), Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970) and Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1906-1995). In a more humorous vein, Leo Rosten wrote The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N in 1937. Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) supported himself for many years by writing for the Jewish Daily Forward and published all of his novels and stories first in Yiddish.
A later generation of Jewish American writers set their novels in New York City as well, including Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) in The Assistant , Saul Bellow (b. 1915) in The Victim, and Philip Roth (b. 1933) in Portnoy's Complaint. Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) remains a forceful voice in Jewish American writing today as well.
Italian immigrants found an eloquent spokesman in Pietro di Donato (1911-1997), whose classic novel Christ in Concrete depicts the hard lives of Italian construction workers on the Lower East Side. Mario Puzo (b. 1920) grew up in the mid-town area known as Hell's Kitchen. Brooklyn is the setting for two novels depicting the struggles of newcomers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1904-1972) describes life from an Irish-American perspective, while Paule Marshall's novel Brown Girl, Brownstones centers on the struggles of a Barbadian family. Oscar Hijuelos' (b. 1951) Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is the story of two Cuban brothers making their way in New York. Poet Victor Hernandez Cruz (b. 1949) arrived on the Lower East Side at the age of six from Puerto Rico. In Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic, Edward Rivera describes the lives of Puerto Rican newcomers.
The Beats, New Journalism and the New York School
Greenwich Village saw its second heyday in the 1950's when it brought together artists who found its bohemian past a genial environment from which to launch their assault on
the conformity and commercialism of America at mid-century. Bob Dylan (b.1941) fused music and poetry. Writers like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Gregory Corso (b. 1930), William
Burroughs (1914-1997) and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) sought a "new vision" in literature. Small presses flourished, launching the careers of many writers who otherwise might not
have found a public voice. Avant-garde writers were aided by the founding of Grove Press which fought many hard-won censorship battles and published the works of New York writers Henry Miller (1891-1980), LeRoi Jones (a.k.a.
In 1955 Brooklyn-raised Norman Mailer (b. 1923) helped to found the Village Voice that gave rise to new and alternative styles in journalistic writing. Journalists began to write with the flair of novelists, while novelists turned to true-life stories and wrote about them as if they were fiction, as did Truman Capote (1924-1984) in In Cold Blood. Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was best known as a journalist although she also wrote novels and a classic autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
By the 1950's the center of the art world had moved from Paris to New York as the abstract expressionist painters, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, redefined art. A group of poets collaborated with many of these painters and came to be known as the New York School of Poets, among them Barbara Guest (b. 1920), Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), James Schuyler (1923-1991), John Ashberry (b. 1927) and Kenneth Koch (b. 1925).
Among the novelists writing in the 1950's and 1960's were native New Yorker J.D.Salinger (b. 1919) who published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, and Brooklyn-born Joseph Heller (1923-1999) who wrote Catch-22 in 1961. In the late 1960's Toni Morrison (b. 1931) arrived in New York where she worked for many years as an editor for Random House. She is the first African American to win the Nobel Prize. Poets continued to thrive in New York during these years too, among them May Swenson (1919-1989) and Denise Levertov (1923-1997).
The Theater: On Broadway and Off
Second to the publishing industry, nothing has attracted more writers to New York than the
theater. The bright lights shone their brightest in the 1920's when 76 theaters offered over 200 plays and musicals a year. Eugene O'Neill, whose many plays blazed on Broadway,
remains the only American playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Lillian Hellman's (1905-1984) The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes both opened on Broadway in the 1930's.
New York's Literary Scene Today
Today New York City continues to be a thriving hub of literary activity. Poetry is kept alive throughout the city by live performance. The Poetry Calendar
lists over sixty readings a week. At the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (i.e., New York + Puerto Rican) poets chant, rap and sing their poems. It was founded in 1974 by Miguel Pinero, Ntozake Shange and Piri
Thomas. St. Marks Church in the Bowery holds famed poetry readings that often run into the early hours of the morning. Even riding the subways, New Yorkers now read poetry on the billboards sponsored by Poetry in Motion.
Writing workshops bring writers and would-be authors together at numerous venues throughout the city. The 92nd Street YMHA draws America's premiere poets to teach classes. The Teachers & Writers Collaborative has pioneered ways to bring teachers and writers together. Among Teachers & Writers authors are Phillip Lopate (b. 1943), Kenneth Koch (b. 1925), Grace Paley (b. 1922), and Ron Padgett (b. 1942). For many years, the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky (1938-1996) taught at New York University as do today Bronx-born novelist
E.L. Doctorow (b. 1931) and the poet Galway Kinnell (b. 1927). Frank McCourt (b. 1931), a former New York City high school teacher, has sold over a million copies of his memoir Angela's Ashes. Whether authors come to work for publishing houses, to write for Broadway, to give readings of their works or to teach, New York City now as ever is a city for writers.Sources:
Corbett, William. New York Literary Lights
. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998.
Jackson, Kenneth T., Ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Joan Brodsky Schur teaches at Village Community School in New York City.