Search results for: William Zinsser
Singing Along With Mitch
The recent death at 99 of Mitch Miller, proprietor of the long-running television hit Sing Along With Mitch, took me back to a summer evening in 1991 at Chautauqua, the lakeside town in western New York that comes alive every summer–as it has since 1874–with a cornucopia of lectures, concerts, and other …
Read MoreOne Man’s Library
The blockbuster trilogy Mutiny on the Bounty was written by James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff in the 1930s in Tahiti, where both men had their home. Hall’s widow, Sarah Hall, still lived in the house that she and her husband built 10 miles outside the town of Papeete, and in 1956, on a …
Read MoreWhere Did the Summer Go?
Where did the summer go?
I thought it had just begun.
Somebody tell me I counted wrong
And it’s really still July.
Somebody tell me the sun
Isn’t really so low
In the sky.
Where did they all get lost,
The things that we somehow missed?
Somebody tell me it’s not too …
The Grand Tour
A few Augusts ago, in Positano, a precipitous town on Italy’s Amalfi coast long favored by tourists, I encountered a custom that I assumed was long dead. A group of Americans—three mothers, two fathers and five teenage sons and daughters—checked into my hotel. I asked one of the girls where they were …
Read MoreLiterate Revelry
When I became a Harper author, in the 1950s, the firm occupied a red brick building, five stories high, at Park Avenue and 33rd Street. On its façade a sign in italic gold letters said Harper & Bros., est. 1817. It was the kind of building where you felt you could walk in and actually see …
Read MoreDetour Ahead
… been willing to go in some off-the-wall direction–to drop everything and just run with it, where other writers might think, “I can’t disrupt the fabric of my narrative.” Ideally, each veer will make the narrative less boring.
That tendency of mine is a direct result of bouncing off William Shawn when
Mark Twain’s Hannibal
When the hot days of August arrive I sometimes think of Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi River town where Samuel Clemens spent his childhood and which he forever preserved when he grew up and became Mark Twain. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer he described Hannibal, which he called Petersburg, as “a white town drowsing in …
Read MoreMy Stardust Memories
Every time a new Woody Allen movie comes along I can’t help thinking back to one of his earlier films, Stardust Memories. That’s the one that gave me my movie career.
The year was 1980, and I was sitting at my typewriter in New York, plying my writer’s trade. When the phone …
Sacred Objects
In 1988, when I went to Bradenton, Florida, to write a book about spring training, I learned that Edd Roush, the oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, had been a winter resident of the town for 36 years and was still a familiar presence at McKechnie Field, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ winter ballpark …
Read MoreLike a Mighty Stream
As a writer I’ve been told certain things I can never forget. Here’s one.
In 1989 I went to Montgomery, Alabama, to write about Maya Lin’s newly dedicated memorial to the men and women and children who were killed during the civil rights movement. Lin’s earlier Vietnam Memorial, in Washington, D …