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    New York Sketches
    New York Sketches
    New York Sketches
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    New York Sketches

    By E. B. White and Martha White

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMcNally Editions
    Release dateDec 3, 2024
    ISBN9781946022745
    New York Sketches
    Author

    E. B. White

    E. B. White, the author of such beloved classics as Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, was born in Mount Vernon, New York. He graduated from Cornell University in 1921 and, five or six years later, joined the staff of the New Yorker magazine, then in its infancy. He died on October 1, 1985, and was survived by his son and three grandchildren. Mr. White's essays have appeared in Harper's magazine, and some of his other books are: One Man's Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E. B. White, Essays of E. B. White, and Poems and Sketches of E. B. White. He won countless awards, including the 1971 National Medal for Literature and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, which commended him for making a "substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children." During his lifetime, many young readers asked Mr. White if his stories were true. In a letter written to be sent to his fans, he answered, "No, they are imaginary tales . . . But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination."

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    • 4/5
      This book, written in 1958, seems more pertinent than ever after the overturning of Roe v. Wade
      "My personhood was erased and overwritten with MOTHER before I even knew who I was."

      Ruth is a sad and desperate housewife in suburban London. Her overbearing and cruel husband Rex works in the city and is home only on the weekends for the neighborly rounds of cocktail parties and Sunday brunches. Their boys are away at boarding school and their daughter Angela is in her first year at Oxford. As I began this sad story of Ruth's lonely life, I was immediately reminded of the lives of the women Betty Friedan described in her ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique.

      Then Angela comes home to tell her mother she is pregnant. Ruth is immediately thrown back to her own youth and her own unwanted pregnancy (with Angela), which led to her marriage to Rex. She doesn't want her daughter to experience the same lack of choices and the consequences that she did. And so the quest for a safe abortion for Angela begins, a not so easy task in the 1950's when abortion was illegal in England (and probably most other countries).

      The emphasis on the plight of the 50's housewife is beautifully written. The book explores loneliness, isolation, and mental health (not to mention reproductive rights). Although the book is more than 60 years old, it felt very relevant to me.

      Recommended.
      3 1/2 stars

      First Line: "Ruth Whiting stepped out of the high train directly it stopped."

      Last line: "Avoiding the carelessly abandoned bicycles, the gum boots, she went into the house."

    Book preview

    New York Sketches - E. B. White

    MANNERS

    Possibly you have noticed this about New Yorkers: instinctively, crossing a one-way street, they glance in the proper direction to detect approaching cars. They always know, without thinking, which way the traffic flows. They glance in the right direction as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind. Yet after that one glance in the direction from which the cars are coming, they always, just before stepping out into the street, also cast one small, quick, furtive look in the opposite direction—from which no cars could possibly come. That tiny glance (which we have noticed over and over again) is the last sacrifice on the altar of human fallibility; it is an indication that people can never quite trust the self-inflicted cosmos, and that they dimly suspect that some day, in the maze of well-regulated vehicles and strong, straight buildings, something will go completely crazy—something big and red and awful will come tearing through town going the wrong way on the one-ways, mowing down all the faithful and the meek. Even if it’s only a fire engine.

    July 16, 1932

    DEFENSE OF THE BRONX RIVER

    The Bronx River rises in Valhalla and flows south to Hell Gate. The People I have mentioned this to, from time to time, have always said, What of it? This cynical indifference is something I resent in New Yorkers, for if this town is ever going to get anywhere, it must study its heritage of natural beauty. When Pola Negri first came to New York a million people awaited her opinion of the skyline. Yet how many of these million know that the Bronx River is wider than the Hutchinson and not so wide as the Ohio?

    People heard of the Bronx River for the first time about ten years ago when somebody named a highway commission after it. There are only a limited number of names you can give highway commissions, and Bronx River happened to be one of them. The commission was meeting one day, to have fun, and someone suggested that they start a search and look for the river after which they were named, and so they did, and they found the Bronx all right and followed it up for several days to its source, traveling in canoes by night and eating as they went, living off the fat of the land, including Williamsbridge.

    They passed through Woodlawn, West Mount Vernon, Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Scarsdale, Hartsdale, and White Plains, eager groups of natives crowding the banks to learn from the voyagers that the river was the Bronx. These natives had noticed the river, in a desultory way, since childhood, but had never thought of it as the Bronx. Even in Bronxville, only two inhabitants had thought of it as the Bronx, and they had kept their hunch to

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