New York is an ever-changing enigma and that's the reason why some people love it so much. Every New Yorker's experience of the multicultural city is different and yet, New Yorkers are tied together by a bond distinctly their own.
Writers that love the New York style and landscape have written about their muse in ways that have helped create layers of the city's identity and, in a lot of ways, helped them shape their own identities as well.
Woody Allen: Filmmaker, Comedian and Writer
It is impossible to separate Woody Allen from the city he so clearly loves. Though his last film was set in Spain, his upcoming release Whatever Works, starring Evan Rachel Wood and Larry David, takes him back to the borough of Manhattan in Greenwich Village.
Throughout his career, Allen has set his stories of neurotic intellectuals unhappy with their lives against the backdrop of the Big Apple. The movies not only capture his vision, but they can be read as an homage to the city, with each location picked skillfully to show the area's beauty.
The film Manhattan, which debuted in 1979, opens with a panorama of fireworks over the city's skyline to the tune of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" – a breathtaking love song to his hometown.
Tom Wolfe: Journalist
It would have been impossible to predict that a Yale graduate originally from Virginia would captivate the interest of New Yorkers with every story. Tom Wolfe co-invented the field of New Journalism and was editor at New York Magazine and Esquire in the 1960s.
Wolfe loved American culture and combined a reporter's knack for storytelling with an anthropologist's sense of humanity to write pieces that made stock car drivers, editors and a hostess of the Black Panthers pop culture icons.
The journalistic nature of his work and the strict attention to the most cutting-edge brands and designs of his era sometimes confine his work. However, it serves as a pristine time capsule that depicts New York in his heyday.
Walt Whitman: The Father of American Poetry
Whitman was born in Long Island in an area that is now known as Hicksville. His father built houses and the family moved around often from Long Island to Brooklyn to Queens to Manhattan.
Leaves of Grass, Whitman's most famous collection of poetry, can be seen in a lot of ways as an ode to New York. Many of the works include the hope, diversity and hustle that characterized the city. During his time in Manhattan, Whitman had worked at 10 of the island's newspapers. He absorbed the mix of cultures and was inspired by the humanity forced together in the populous city.
Though Whitman spent the final days of his life in Washington, D.C., after volunteering to dress wounds in the Civil War, he revised and perfected the collection that was inspired by his life in New York there. Every aspect of the city was embraced by Whitman: from riding the ferry to the masses to the architecture to the geography.
George Templeton Strong: Prolific Diarist
Whether he liked what was happening or he didn't, George Templeton Strong was one of the most prolific New York City diarists of the nineteenth century. He lived in New York when the city expanded from 200,000 people to over 1 million.
Though his writings come from the perspective of a civil servant involved in many different areas of the city's management, they also provide candid commentary about the music, culture and daily aspects of New York life.
Never without an opinion, Strong wrote about shifts in high society and what, in his eyes, would strengthen the city – with the passion of a man who clearly loved his digs.
Strong's prose is used extensively in Ric Burns' 8-part series New York: A Documentary Film.
New York City's Diversity
Even in the writings that celebrate the city, it's clear what a different world view people rubbing elbows in the same streets and subways can have. From a psychosis-obsessed comedians to Southern gentlemen to bohemian poets to ruling class lawyers, all walks of life develop the layers of New York.
Source:
Corbett, William. New York Literary Lights. St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1998
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