New York Sketches

by E. B. White, Martha White (Foreword by)

Overview

E. B. White’s greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly.

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 favorite 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 behavior 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946022738
Publisher:	McNally Editions
Publication date:	12/03/2024
Series:	McNally Editions
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

July 11, 1899

Date of Death:

October 1, 1985

Place of Birth:

Mount Vernon, New York

Place of Death:

North Brooklin, Maine

Education:

B.A., Cornell University, 1921

Website:

http://www.harperchildrens.com/hch/author/author/white/

Table of Contents

Foreword by Martha White

MANNERS

Notes & Comment: July 16, 1932

Defense of the Bronx River

Notes & Comment: February 18, 1928

Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952

Definitions

Notes & Comment: July 3, 1954

Notes & Comment: March 24, 1945

Window Box

Notes & Comment: December 4, 1948

Notes & Comment: July 17, 1954

Notes & Comment: November 5, 1949

Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952

Notes & Comment: July 3, 1937

Notes & Comment: February 19, 1943

The Rock Dove

Notes & Comment: May 11, 1935

Lines in Anguish

Daisy at One Fifth Ave

Daisy at Schrafft’s

Interview with Daisy

Notes & Comment: October 6, 1923

The Gastropods

The Wings of Orville

Reading Room

Notes & Comment: January 16, 1937

Notes & Comment: January 6, 1951

The Lady Is Cold

MEMORIES & INVENTIONS

Obituary

Business Show

The Hour of Letdown

The Street of the Dead

The Retort Transcendental

Child’s Play

Journeys

The Hotel of the Total Stranger

Goodbye to 48th Street

Gramercy Park

Getting Away

Notes & Comment: June 11, 1955

Editorial Reviews

New York Sketches, a new collection of E.B. White’s musings about New York City, offers two pleasures, one nostalgic and one stylistic: There is the invocation of the New York of the 1930s and ’40s, a glamorous jumble of fast-talking journalists and smoky saloons, and there is the wry poetry of the writing . . . Jewels of observation that glint on every page of Sketches . . . A world described in such loving detail overflows with wonders: The rigorous attention in “Sketches” is a kind of re-enchantment.”

—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“The variety of subject matter to be found in these graceful pages is enormous. But no matter what his subject, Mr. White always writes about it in a prose that is a joy to read.”

—The New York Times

“E.B. White is a master of the gently amusing and perceptive essay and his New York Sketches is a treat. It fits alongside his ode to NYC called Here Is New York, but this is more casual, more fun . . . No need to pour over dusty back issues in the library, panning for gold. It’s all here and surprisingly durable tossed-off gems they are.”

—Michael Giltz, Parade

“This frisky collection from Charlotte’s Web author White (1899–1985) compiles brief dispatches . . . chronicling the vagaries of New York City life . . . The selections are rife with the author’s dry wit . . . His crystalline prose also captures the city’s beauty . . . This pulses with the irrepressible heartbeat of New York City.”

—Publishers Weekly

“His voice rumbles with authority through sentences of surpassing grace. In his more than fifty years at The New Yorker, White set a standard of writerly craft for that supremely well-wrought magazine. In genial, perfectly poised essay after essay, he has wielded the English language with as much clarity and control as any American of his time.”

—Raymond Sokolov, Newsweek

“Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White’s style incorporates eloquence without affectation, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White’s creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities.”

—The Washington Post

From the Publisher

A love song to NYC told in anecdotes, essays, jokes, musings, stories and prose.

Jesica Sweedler DeHart

E.B. White is a well-known and beloved children's author, but compiled here are the short essays and poems he wrote on all-things New York. Each literary sketch left me wondering in silence about a New York now lost and instilled in me a sense of envy toward this master observer. His writing packs a surprising bite carried along by steady and often lyrical prose.

Clarisse Jorah

Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White’s style incorporates eloquence without affectation, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White’s creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities.

The Washington Post

The variety of subject matter to be found in these graceful pages is enormous. But no matter what his subject, Mr. White always writes about it in a prose that is a joy to read.

The New York Times

The variety of subject matter to be found in these graceful pages is enormous. But no matter what his subject, Mr. White always writes about it in a prose that is a joy to read.

New York Times

Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White’s style incorporates eloquence without affectation, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White’s creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities.

Washington Post