New York
Herman Melville was born in New York City and went to sea from its port; Walt Whitman worked as a printer and journalist in Brooklyn, where the first edition of Leaves of Grass was set and printed in 1855. Both writers built books out of the trades and the crowds around them.
New York Public Library's research divisions hold strong collections of American nineteenth-century printing. Its digital collections are freely accessible, which makes it a practical first stop rather than only a landmark.
A library to check
- New York Public Library — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to New York
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A novel that refuses to stay a novel: part adventure, part encyclopedia, part sermon.
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855. The book that changed what an English poem was allowed to look like.
- The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton, 1920. Wharton's masterpiece, and the best novel about how a society enforces its rules without ever stating them.
- The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton, 1905. A controlled, painful novel about a woman with taste and no income.
- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — Stephen Crane, 1893. The first American novel to treat the slums without sentiment, written by a twenty-one-year-old.
- The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
- Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.