New York Literary Lights: William Corbett

by William Corbett

William Corbett takes an expansive look at the ghosts, the landmarks, and the current denizens who make New York City so popular with the literary crowd. Ranging from Paul Auster to Zora Neale Hurston, from the Algonquin Round Table to the Nuyorican Poets Café, from Edgar Allan Poe to the Beat Generation, Corbett takes us on a dizzying ride through the literary highlights of New York. Illuminating a city rich in famous writers against a combustible mixture of cultures and commerce, Corbett shows us how New York's multifaceted literary present has emerged from its constantly evolving past. New York Literary Lights travels through both time and place to provide an altogether enlightening, entertaining hybrid of history, gossip, and reference book.

Genres: Nonfiction

346 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

William Corbett was an American poet, essayist, editor, educator, and publisher.

Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Bronwen]

I have to admit; I’ve been reading this book very gradually. It’s an alphabetical guidebook with history about writers, bars, neighborhoods, galleries, presses, and anything else relevant to writing in New York City. It’s well-written and interesting, lots of nice little tid-bits, but it’s rather heavy for the subway, and since it jumps from thing to thing alphabetically, it doesn’t hold one’s pre-sleep attention quite so well as certain other books. But I now notice street names where writers lived for a period.