Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface 1. Reflections on Walking: From Plato to Baudelaire 2. Brits Walking New York: The Trollopes (Mother and Son) and Dickens 3. Walt Whitman: Magnetic Mannahatta 4. Herman Melville: Lost in the City 5. William Dean Howells: Boston vs. New York 6. Jacob Riis: Walking for Reform 7. Henry James: What to Make of the Bristling City 8. Stephen Crane: Adventures in Poverty 9. Theodore Dreiser: From Broadway to the Bowery 10. James Weldon Johnson: A Black Man in Manhattan 11. Alfred Kazin: Reveries of a Solitary Walker 12. Elizabeth Hardwick: West Side Stories 13. Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole: Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 14. The Synthetic Sublime Notes Bibliography Index

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A fascinating literary walking tour of New York City as seen through the eyes of American and British writers

About the Author

Stephen Miller is a freelance writer and the author of five books, including Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. His articles on literary, political, and cultural questions have appeared in many journals in the United States and Great Britain, including the American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, and Sewanee Review, among others. He has an M.A. in English from Yale and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers.

Reviews

"A brilliant analysis of walking in New York and how it has been viewed and experienced by some of our greatest writers. Miller's analysis of Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Teju Cole, Alfred Kazin, and others is both incisive and highly original." -- -William Helmreich author of The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City "I can't imagine any specialist in the field not finding this book a worthy addition to the literature. It's a pleasure to read." -- -Phillip Lopate Director, Nonfiction Graduate Program at Columbia University "Walking New York, although socially aware, is an unashamed work of literary studies, recounting for its readers the way this particular city has seized the attention of the writers, how they have been affected by it, and how it has been reflected in their work." -- -John McLaren Victoria University, Melbourne "Stephen Miller's Walking New York surveys an urban and literary landscape, focusing on writers who have taken Manhattan as turf, laboratory and crucible for their creations... Mr. Miller is an amiable guide, filling his chapters with interesting facts and reminders of how Manhattan has always both embodied change and retained constancy." -Willard Spiegelman, The Wall Street Journal "Stephen Miller invites readers on what he calls a verbal tour ... [revealing] the universal themes that define New York's metamorphosis over two centuries: vitality, diversity, density." -The New York Times "In 'Walking New York', essayist Stephen Miller takes a look at the city's literary perambulators, examining the writing of Stephen Crane, Alfred Kazin and Teju Cole, among others, and offering an evolving portrait of New York through the centuries. 'Each Writer' Mr. Miller says in the book's preface, 'wanders a different city'." -The New York Observer