E. B. White (1899-1985) was in his fiftieth year when he returned to New York City from Brooklin, Maine, to write a 7500 word piece on the town that did as much for him as he did for it. The commissioning magazine was Holiday (1946-1977), which catered to Americans whose postwar dollars were suddenly worth more in Paris than the trouble it took to get there. But no point in travelling to Paris if you can't tell your cute but condescending waiter, "Oui, j'ai visitée New York et j'ai vu votre statue surdimensionnée."
From the sounds of it, White spent more time in his hotel room reading the papers than swinging it outdoors during one of NYC's (read: Manhattan's) hottest Julys on record. Below is a passage that foreshadows both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and the 9/11 WTC attack:
"Since I have been sitting in this miasmic airshaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest airshow ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn't attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn't even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. " (22)
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