The Complete Zinsser on Friday
Congratulations to William Zinsser, winner of the 2012 National Magazine Award in the category of Digital Commentary
William Zinsser’s collected essays for this website—spanning writing, the arts, and popular culture—won the 2012 National Magazine Award in the category of Digital Commentary. Zinsser, who died in 2015, was the author of 18 books, including the beloved On Writing Well.
Envoi
What I’ve learned writing this blog
The Overtone Years
Sympathetic vibrations at the age of 89
Looking for a Model
My true writing style emerged when I became a teacher
The Writer Who Stayed
Novelist Daniel Fuchs went west and wrote screenplays for 34 years
Thanksgiving Day Repainted
Norman Rockwell’s successor
The Perils of Pauline Kael
On not taking yourself seriously as a movie critic
Brother, Can You Spare a Job?
Songwriter Yip Harburg and Occupy Wall Street
Hats Off
And then where will we stow them?
Nowhere People
The downside of being well connected
Dancing With Scrolls
How I first learned about Simchat Torah
Hold the Emotion!
Don’t set out to write a heart-tugging memoir
“Who Would Care about My Story?”
Successful memoirs are built from details that ring true
No Place Like “Home”
Historian v New York Times hinges on the meaning of “home delivery”
Flunking Description
Why I tried to write like a Victorian novelist
Improving a Masterpiece
Messing around with “Porgy”
Peter McGuire’s Holiday
Summer’s final gift of unexamined time
No Degrees of Separation
Letting go when the kid leaves for college
Blue Moons and Buttermilk Skies
American songwriters knew that weather was a state of mind
No Proverbs, Please
Writing English as a second language
The ‘A’ Word
What’s expected of an orthodox WASP
Summer House Books
In praise of The Mask of Fu Manchu and other chestnuts
On the Trail of Sublime
Starting out at Niagara Falls
Unexpected Visitors
Why voodoo is preferable to adumbrate
How to Get to Our House
Bob & Linda provide simple directions
The Last of the Lone Wanderers
What elevates travel writing to literature
Me and My Relationships
Sandra is giving me up for Brad
Baseball Without Myths
Manager Jim Leyland’s “unbelievably rough summer”
Writing for the Wrong Reasons
Publishers don’t necessarily have the answers
In Memoriam
A visit to Omaha Beach
Central Park Lite
Experiential optimization in the app brigade
No Last Names
Fundraisers call me “William”
Trapped by the Past
Finding a different take on John Horne Burns’s story
Once Around the Sun
What I’ve learned in a year of blogging
Easter Light
“…was blind, but now I see.”
Content Management
In praise of long-form journalism
Tristes Tropiques
Remembering the screenwriter of North by Northwest
Prisoners of Britspeak
The elocution problem with English movies
A Cousin from Cologne
This Zinsser family story took me by surprise
In Bed by the Last Eight
Musings about songs upon the death of a fine singer
The 300-Word Challenge
On writing short essays
Working for Tina Brown
It’s about how to communicate
Looking Forward, Looking Back
What are memoirs about?
The Right to Write
Getting published isn’t the only reason to write your story
Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln
Up from Disneyland, on to Appomattox
No Second Act
John Horne Burns and The Gallery
Stardust Memories
Immigrant lyricists embraced American language with fierce love
Goodbye and Don’t Come Back
My problems with postmodernism
E-Maledictions
It’s a life choice: I don’t have email
Blondie and Dilbert
How Chic Young made me look none too bright
Obama and the Lac Bug
Here’s hoping our president gets many more shellackings
A Christmas Dinner
The frozen winter of 1944, on a base in the heel of Italy
Stopping Steve Martin
When giving the public what it wants is a bad idea
Yes, But
I collect self-canceling headlines, but I’m tired of them
“Bring Back Boredom!”
Rewire multitask tendencies
Tales of ‘South Pacific’
Star turns and caricatures then; dramatic coherence today
On the Trail of the Chêng Ho
From Coral Gables, Florida, to a harbor in Tahiti
Tips
I don’t give them to writers
The Revenge of the Comic Novel
The Finkler Question joins the ranks of Man Booker Prize winners
Crash Through That Line of Blue!
In football songs, exact rhymes and strict meters are not required
An Interesting Life
Frank Boyden, Deerfield Academy headmaster
Fantasia for the Left Hand
Rehabilitation poetry for a wounded friend
Men of Letters
Book-of-the-Month Club mandarins
Out of Order
In writing, think first about process instead of product
Singing Along with Mitch
Miller revived an American tradition
One Man’s Library
Author James Norman Hall collected Joseph Conrad
Where Did the Summer Go?
Songs about a seaside community
The Grand Tour
Not just Renaissance Italy any more
Literate Revelry
Light verse gets no respect
Detour Ahead
Lost with Ian Frazier
Mark Twain’s Hannibal
Fictions and truths in the Mississippi River town
Sacred Objects
Hall of Famer Edd Roush’s last interview
Family Albums
Memoirs with wide appeal accentuate the particular
Stevenson’s Ghost
Where the Treasure Island author wrote his final chapter
Like a Mighty Stream
Maya Lin’s monument in Montgomery
What Does It Do?
What Dwike Mitchell taught me about broken pianos
Melville’s South Seas Myth
Re-enforced by Gauguin and Lamour
Life and Work
Why plumbers are good role models for writers
The Old Flotilla
Checking out Kipling’s Burma
Permission Givers
To teach is to allow and to encourage
At Ease in the Stone Age
Closing the gap between Finchingfield and Irian Jaya
Rescued by Humor
More thoughts on less seriousness
A Joyful Noise
Lighten up, even when your story is dark
Sharing the Issues
Let me tell you what I think about that
Simple Geometry
A Matisse quote, Beethoven’s “Ode,” and Hirschfeld’s lines
