New York Sketches
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Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favourite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love—but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behaviour of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.
New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, or far from home—and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called “the inscrutable and lovely town,” but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.
Elwyn Brooks White (1899–1985) was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest of six children. He is best known today for his classic children’s books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little; he was also among the best and funniest American prose stylists of the twentieth century. Martha White, granddaughter of E. B. White, is a writer and editor. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and many other publications.