Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
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Where the Writers Live
LITERARY BROOKLYN: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life.
By Evan Hughes.
Holt. 337 pp. $17
The New York City borough of Brooklyn is one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. Drenched in working-class iconography, from baseball’s fabled Dodgers to the 1970s television series Welcome Back, Kotter, it has long been home to immigrants and the many other New Yorkers who can’t afford to live in Manhattan. It has scarcely been perceived as a hotspot for the cultural set. Yet over the past decade, much ink has been spilled charting the migration of writers to New York City’s suddenly fashionable destination. Some, such as the inimitable British novelist Martin Amis, have even come from across the pond. Few cultural critics have attempted, however, to put this development in historical perspective, a glaring omission given the rich diversity of Brooklyn’s literary tradition.
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Leonard Benardo is associate director of the Open Society Foundations and the coauthor, with Jennifer Weiss, of Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges, and More Got Their Names (2006).
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