Writers and Readers Sharing the City Of the Word
". . . I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across 62d Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage." -- Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That" "As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dusk -- the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars. A band started to play on deck, but the majesty of the city made the march trivial and tinkling. From that moment I knew that New York, however often I might leave it, was home." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "My Lost City" . . . WRITERS are always coming to New York and, even when they leave, coming back to it. Fitzgerald wrote of his return in 1927 after three years in exile in Europe. Joan Didion described the days when she came to New York from California in the 50's, after she and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, moved to Los Angeles in the 60's; they returned in the 80's and remain today.
