Search results for: William Zinsser
Trapped by the Past
Last week, looking back on my first year as a blogger, I mentioned that the hardest column to write was the one that taught me the most. “No Second Act” (Feb. 4) was about the forgotten American writer John Horne Burns, whose World War II novel The Gallery, published in 1947 to great acclaim, made …
Read MoreOnce Around the Sun
This column completes one year of “Zinsser on Friday.” Thank you for your company and for your trust.
My 52-week journey into unknown territory continues to teach me many things about writing that take me by surprise. I was a lifelong child of paper. I wrote articles on paper that got printed on paper …
Easter Light
Two Sunday mornings ago, one of the last Sundays in the long Lenten season that prepares Christians for the promise of Easter, the reading from the New Testament in my church, St. Bartholomew’s, in Manhattan, was the passage from the Book of John in which a man born blind is given sight by an …
Read MoreContent Management
I’ve been reading about a new app, called The Atavist, that will provide an online home for “long-form journalism”–articles that run more than 6,000 words and explore their subject in unusual depth. Now a dying species in the shrunken universe of print, those extended magazine pieces were once a bright ornament …
Read MorePrisoners of Britspeak
My wife and I got some good news the other day: we aren’t the only people who can’t understand British actors. Until now we have nursed our shameful secret in the privacy of our apartment, hunched over the television set, watching English movies that we would probably enjoy if we could unlock the …
Read MoreA Cousin from Cologne
… related? What genetic pull had John’s paintings exerted through the gallery window on the woman from Germany? Annette and I uncovered the trail.
My great-grandfather, William Zinsser, emigrated from Germany in 1849 and founded a shellac business that would stay on the same block in mid-Manhattan for 125 years. Two brothers came …
In Bed by the Last Eight
The cabaret singer Mary Cleere Haran, who died last month in a bicycle accident at the age of 58, was one of the brightest stars in a small galaxy of American preservationists–singers and singer-pianists who perform the classics of the Great American Songbook and are custodians of that literature. Their accompanying “patter” is …
Read MoreThe 300-Word Challenge
I once got a call from a woman who said she was the editor of a magazine called Endless Vacations. Endless vacations! The very name gave me a thrill: a vacation that never stopped. I could be seamlessly whisked from a safari in Kenya to a Club Med on the Riviera to a temple dance …
Read MoreWorking for Tina Brown
I studied the photograph on the front page of The New York Times—two standing figures—as if I were puzzling out an ancient glyph. What kind of society practiced such an odd tribal rite? The caption said: “Tina Brown with Stephen Colvin, chief of the Newsweek-Daily Beast Company.” Ms. Brown, the high-buzz …
Read MoreLooking Forward, Looking Back
As a boy I never kept watch for the first robin. My eye was out for the first newspaper articles from the small Florida towns where the major league baseball teams went for spring training. Bradenton! Lakeland! Clearwater! Vero Beach! “Come on down!” those places called to me, and I vowed that some day I …
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