4.0
Here is New York
ByPublisher Description
In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”
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4.0
“here is new york & here it’ll always be …
e.b. white captured new york in a personified, descriptive, yet non-heroic way. in fact, i’m about to personify it more than he did, i feel. as a born and raised new yorker, i’m impressed and speechless at how he captured new york as it’s ever-changing, yet still the same as it was when this was written and published. new york hasn’t changed, but rather, i feel it has adapted. thinking about it comparatively, 1948 versus 2025, a lot has changed, yet not much at all. even though the city has seen and lived so much, it somehow remains the same at its core.
e.b. white was relatable and realistic in the way he wrote about new york, yet he didn’t romanticize it as we often see the city written about.
to think how the city hasn’t changed from 1948 to 2025, it’s still the city that never sleeps, with millions and millions of people from different ethnicities navigating the trials and tribulations of the city. he acknowledges, even then, the out-of-towner, the commuter, and the new yorker.
he captured new york as it was, and we now see he captured it how it is, with not much changing in between.
the most striking part was how he predicted, or rather acknowledged, the possibility of an event like 9/11, though he wrote it in 1948, and how a city like new york is a target. yet he didn’t live to even see his prediction come true. he didn’t predict 9/11 in a terrorist way, but he predicted how easy it would be to pin the city down by airplanes and attack buildings.
he captured how great the city is with all its opportunities and acknowledged the challenges, how few people survive, and how hard it is to survive such a city and place.
as a true new yorker and as a reader, in such a small amount of pages, e.b. white opened a lot of emotions about a city i love to my core.
i wrote this reflection after reading it and found myself misty-eyed walking to my train in grand central, thinking about how much has changed and how much hasn’t. i even ran into someone i knew on the way - so new york. somehow, it felt like the city was nodding back at me. some things never change, and thank god for that.”
About E. B. White
“Thoroughly American and utterly beautiful” is how William Shawn, his editor at the New Yorker, described E. B. White’s prose. At the magazine, White developed a pure and plain-spoken literary style; his writing was characterized by wit, sophistication, optimism, and moral steadfastness. In 1978 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the body of his work. E. B. White died in 1985
Roger Angell is a writer and fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Roger Angell is a writer and fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Other books by E. B. White
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