The Complete Zinsser on Friday

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