New York women have been uniquely celebrated long before Candace Bushnell’s delicious “Sex and the City”, a book before it was an HBO series, made them a household word.
Henry James’ “Washington Square”, also staged and filmed as “The Heiress” by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, takes us back to the 19th century where Catherine Sloper, the plain daugther of a wealthy widowed doctor who mourns her beautiful mother, is obsessed for life by Morris Townsend whose passion is pegged to the rise and fall of her fortune. One of James’ psychological masterpieces, it’s just as haunting today.
James’ friend Edith Wharton turns the Cinderella story on its head in “The House of Mirth” where Lily Bart, a New Yorker as proud as she is well born, learns how the other half live in this unforgettable book.
Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” is a wonderful look at the coming of age of Francey Nolan who escaped into books and the lives of the fascinating denizens of her borough at the turn of the century. Later on, Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” dissects extended political corruption with wry complexity. All four of these books have been made into films.
New York’s Bohemian Age was spawned in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, and chronicled over the next three decades by such wise and witty literary ladies as Dawn Powell, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of Powell’s many novels, “A Time To Be Born” follows a small town girl who came to the city to mend her broken heart and make her fortune, abetted by a couple modeled on Henry and Clare Booth Luce.
Though not successful in her lifetime, Powell’s reputation has blossomed under the nurturing of such fans as Gore Vidal, whose “American Chronicles” also provide unique views of New York. The first, “Burr”, is a satiric portrait of an early Governor of New York State, the fascinating amoral Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton in one of our history’s most famous duels and came close to seceding a hunk of the country with himself as King.
Dorothy Parker’s best known short story is “Big Blonde” but she’s unforgettable in other fields, such as her dramatic criticism for Vanity Fair (“Katherine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”) and her poetry. Some call it merely verse but it sticks with you like memories of first love, lost love, and all the lovers in between.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, considered a more serious poet, is a premiere American practitioner of that vanished form, the sonnet. From the passions of her early years, she morphed into philosophy, as in this line from Sonnet XVIII of “The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems”.
“So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind”
The sidewalks of New York will never look the same after dipping into Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy”, a literate post-modern exploration of mystery stories about mystery.
Category mystery fans love Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” series. Under the name Evan Hunter, he also wrote the classic “Blackboard Jungle”, based on his high school teaching days.
New York lends itself to fantasy, notably in Mark Helprin’s “Winter’s Tale” where magical realism invades New York at the turn of the century and Jack Finney’s “Time and Again”, a page-turner using reincarnation to revive history.
And last but indispensable, Knopf’s literate guide book which is much more than just “where is it?” The cover is a great conversation piece while having cocktails at the Top of the Sixes.
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