New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009

New York is a city like no other. Through the centuries, she’s been embraced and reviled, worshipped and feared, praised and battered—all the while standing at the crossroads of American politics, business, society, and culture. Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter, a lifelong diary enthusiast, scoured the archives of libraries, historical societies, and private estates to assemble here an almost holographic view of this iconic metropolis. Starting on January 1 and continuing day by day through the year, these journal entries are selected from four centuries of writing—revealing vivid and compelling snapshots of life in the Capital of the World.

 

“Today I arrived by train in New York City . . . and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!”—Edward Robb Ellis, May 22, 1947

 

Includes diary excerpts from Sherwood Anderson • Albert Camus • Noël Coward • Dorothy Day • John Dos Passos • Thomas Edison • Allen Ginsberg • Keith Haring • Henry Hudson • Anne Morrow Lindbergh • H. L. Mencken • John Cameron Mitchell • Julia Rosa Newberry • Eugene O’Neill • Edgar Allan Poe • Theodore Roosevelt • Elizabeth Cady Stanton • Alexis de Tocqueville • Mark Twain • Gertrude Vanderbilt • Andy Warhol • George Washington • Walt Whitman • and many others

 

“The most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across.”—The New York Times

 

“A celebration of the complexity, beauty and chaos of New York City.”—New York Journal of Books

 

“An absolute masterpiece.”—The Atlantic

Teresa Carpenter is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller Missing Beauty. She is a former senior editor of The Village Voice, where her feature articles on crime and the law won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. She lives in New York City’s Greenwich Village with her husband, writer Steven Levy, and their son.

From the Hardcover edition.