We’ll look at how five great writers––James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens, Alfred Kazin, and E.B. White––describe life in New York. None of the works we’ll read is especially polemical. Rather than exhort or admonish or sneer, they show something important––about black life or Jewish life or poverty or a literary career or being an Oxford scofflaw in love with America. We’ll talk about style, word-choice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, essay structure, and rhetorical technique. Anyone should join who finds most op-ed and political magazine writing nowadays very dull, and believes (rightly) that there’s a better way.

Session 1–(July 23^rd)–“I Fought the Law in Bloomberg’s New York” by Christopher Hitchens; “Here is New
York” by E.B. White

Session 2–(July 30^th)–“My Negro Problem––and Ours” by Norman Podhoretz; “From the American Scene:
The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948” by James Baldwin

Session 3–(August 6^th)–“A Walker in the City” by Alfred Kazin

All sessions will take place on Zoom.