Includes bibliographical references (p. 1041-1049).

In wholly original and startling ways, the authors of this inspired volume capture New York's spirit -- on the streets and in the subways, in the shops, hotels, and "eating houses", at riots, in newspapers, on bridges and in parks, in sweat shops, and in some of its denizens' diaries. An expansive range of more than one hundred brilliant voices includes Mary McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Marianne Moore, Gay Talese, E.B. White, Allen Ginsberg, O.Henry, Alfred Kazin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, and John Cheever, among many, many others. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.