On a cold winter afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with the support of organized labor to build middle-income …
The legacy is invariable—a brief pang of guilt followed by overwhelming relief at my own escape from the northeast Bronx. I come off the Henry Hudson Parkway and where the traffic light flags me down, at the pocked and rutted …
Alfred Kazin’s new book is one of those largescale thematic studies in which a prominent critic offers a summing-up of American literary culture. Both the book’s approach and its thesis are closely related to what used to be called “wisdom …
One approaches novels that have been as highly praised as Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter with a certain caution. About one-fourth of the way into the novel, however, all caution breaks down, and the reader finds himself ready to acknowledge that …
One talks to these retired garment workers, these small, stooped men and women. They have aged as they have been used. Time is supposed to weather, not crumble. Things are not supposed to take the place of people. But I …
When I came to see Mike Nichols’s film version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the lines on both sides of the Sutton Theater were already long. There are, apparently, a large number of New Yorkers willing to spend $3.50 for a …
