New York is a city like no other. Through the centuries,
she’s been embraced and reviled, worshiped and feared,
praised and battered—all the while standing at the
crossroads of American politics, business, society, and
culture. Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times
bestselling author Teresa Carpenter, a lifelong diary
enthusiast, scoured the archives of libraries, historical
societies, and private estates to assemble here an almost
holographic view of this iconic metropolis.
Starting on January 1 and traveling day by day through the
year, these journal entries are selected from four centuries
of writing—from the early 1600s to the present—allowing New
York natives and visitors, writers and artists, thinkers and
bloggers, to reach across time and share vivid and
compelling snapshots of life in the Capital of the World.
New York Diaries reveals intimate, whimsical, profound,
sobering, and indelible reflections on such historical
moments as President Washington’s first State of the Union
address, the death of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the
Titanic, the end of World War II—even the first incursion of
Europeans into the city’s Upper Bay on September 11, 1609, a
presage to our country’s greatest catastrophe nearly four
hundred years later. Featuring familiar faces and
fascinating unknowns, these pages provide a rich mosaic that
is uniquely New York.
With excerpts from the writing of Sherwood Anderson •
William H. Bell • Albert Camus • Chad the Minx • Noël Coward
• Dorothy Day • John Dos Passos • Thomas Edison • Allen
Ginsberg • William B. Gould • Keith Haring • Henry Hudson •
Anne Morrow Lindbergh • Judith Malina • H. L. Mencken • John
Cameron Mitchell • Joyce Carol Oates • Eugene O’Neill •
Philippe Petit • Edgar Allan Poe • Theodore Roosevelt •
Elizabeth Cady Stanton • William Steinway • Alexis de
Tocqueville • Mark Twain • Gertrude Vanderbilt • Andy Warhol
• George Washington • Kurt Weill • Walt Whitman • and many
others.