Here Is New York The Little Bookroom

“Just to dip into this miraculous essay—to experience the wonderful lightness and momentum of its prose, its supremely casual air and surprisingly tight knit—is to find oneself going ahead and rereading it all. White’s homage feels as fresh now as fifty years ago.” —John Updike

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.”

“Here is New York, a lovely evocation of the spirit of the city, is even more a startlingly vivid picture of a particular time. You sweat with White in his un-air-conditioned 90-degree hotel room and walk down the streets of 1948. The ride is a great one; the writing is good enough to bottle.” —Lucy Sante

“New York was the most exciting, most civilized, most congenial city in the world when this book was written. It’s the finest portrait ever painted of the city at the height of its glory.” —Russell Baker

About the Authors

“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.