Search results for: William Zinsser
Blondie and Dilbert
The New Year begins with a journalistic bombshell. As of January 2, 2011, Brenda Starr, Reporter, will do no more reporting; her syndicate announced that it is canceling the comic strip after 70 years. Seventy years! That’s one of the great American streaks, no less impressive than Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak …
Read MoreThe Last Word
The Overtone Years
The number 88, referring to the number of keys on a piano, hovers in our collective memory. I remember a character in a Dick Tracy comic strip named 88 Keys, and I’ve listened to honky-tonk pianists who call themselves “Mister 88” or who “tickle the 88s.”
As anyone who ever …
Envoi
With this column I’m saying goodbye to you and to “Zinsser on Friday.” After almost two years of weekly deadlines it’s time to change the rhythm of my life. I want to try a more informal kind of online writing—on my own website, williamzinsserwriter.com. Look for me there in the new …
Read MoreThe Overtone Years
The number 88, referring to the number of keys on a piano, hovers in our collective memory. I remember a character in a Dick Tracy comic strip named 88 Keys, and I’ve listened to honky-tonk pianists who call themselves “Mister 88” or who “tickle the 88s.”
As anyone who ever played a piano …
Looking for a Model
Writing is learned by imitation; we all need models. “I’d like to write like that,” we think at various moments in our journey, mentioning an author whose style we want to emulate. But our best models may be men and women writing in fields different from our own. When I wrote On Writing Well …
Read MoreThe Writer Who Stayed
… movies a touch of class they often hired well-known writers and playwrights from the Eastern literary establishment—near celebrities like Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—to write or rewrite a screenplay.
The sums they offered were unimaginably large to the writers and playwrights, and they flocked to Los Angeles to grab …
Thanksgiving Day Repainted
I’ve been trying to imagine Norman Rockwell trying to paint the modern American family gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table. For four decades Rockwell was the custodian of our domestic mythology, mainly with his covers for The Saturday Evening Post, which fixed in our collective memory the sacramental moments of small-town life—Bobby …
Read MoreBrother, Can You Spare a Job?
The black cloud of unemployment hanging over the land got me thinking of the lyricist E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and his anthem of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It was written by Harburg and the composer Jay Gorney in 1932 for a musical, Americana, about “the forgotten man” and his betrayal …
Read MoreHats Off
Reluctantly bowing to fashion’s timetable, I’ve put away my summer straw hat. It’s a broad-brimmed Panama that far exceeds the uses expected of a hat. Most obviously, it covers my head. It also shields my eyes from the glaring sun. But mainly it gives me an identity in an age when …
Read MoreNowhere People
Look in the glove compartment of my car and you won’t see a single glove. But you will find maps—tattered maps of places I once visited. I can look at road maps of the United States forever, reminding myself of strangers met along the way, of small roads with small towns of unexpected …
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