A Particularly Ralph Reading List
Here's a carefully curated list of great books about life in N.Y.C. that combine style on the page with an eye for style in the room.A Particularly Ralph Reading List
To become an artist is to take a chance, to accept a dare. Can I tell the story that’s inside of me? Perhaps that’s why so many writers and artists—and designers—have been drawn to New York City. It’s a stage for ambition. The streets, the people, the buildings, and the styles on display offer a daily provocation: Who are you and what have you got to show us? The artists who come to define an era are the ones who accept this challenge. They respond to the urban tableau as individuals, inspired and alive, while the city changes before them, retaining its mystery and allure. Here, then, is a list of writers who have captured this formative power of New York.
This scandalous novel, set in 1933, opens with a wedding in Stuyvesant Square of the bohemian couple Kay Leiland Strong and Harald Petersen, who are “too busy and dynamic to let convention cramp their style.” Kay is a painter in dungarees; Harald a playwright in brown suede shoes. Kay has seven Vassar roommates—The Group—who share a desire to not “become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened.” We follow along as these dewy, mostly upper-class women navigate marriage, independence, disenchantment, and frustrated love. The scandal was due to the book’s frank depiction of female desire (still quite hot), but its lasting influence is depicting how the social worlds of the city shape a collection of friends. It’s the precursor to Sex & The City, Girls, and so many other generational tales.
The gossip around The New York Times newsroom was that Cunningham was a Mayflower descendant, but he came from middle-class Irish-Catholic roots and lived like a fashion monk in an apartment above Carnegie Hall. For three decades, he photographed the people of New York while dressed in a (now iconic) blue French chore jacket and chinos, traveling everywhere by bicycle. Women ditching high heels for sneakers, elegant accessories in unusual colors, New Yorkers navigating puddles—Cunningham documented them all. “Constant change is the breath of fashion,” he writes in this memoir, in which he tells his coming-of-age story with the poise and élan that he gave his photographs. A young gay man, entranced by “the glittering swank of Park Avenue,” comes to the city with dreams of becoming a milliner. He escapes his past and somehow becomes himself.
In the summer of 1948, at the invitation of Holiday magazine, E.B. White took the train to Manhattan from Brooklin, Maine, and felt the pulse of his old haunts. The result was one of the great essays about New York; his stepson Roger Angell describes it as a “whole city delivered in seventy-five hundred words.” You can read the essay in an afternoon and savor White’s epigrams—“No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky”—and his cool appraisal of the changing metropolis. “The essential fever” of the city is intact, but White detects a new mood in the air: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible.” White was writing in the shadow of nuclear war, but his intimations of fragility have become stronger today. New York remains an implausible experiment in civility and cooperation. We bring to it our style and our sense of ourselves.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald presented a powerful romantic vision of New York: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” The Crack-Up, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays published after his early death while living in Hollywood, gives us the other side of that vision, now shaped by experience. In the luminous, beautiful essay My Lost City, Fitzgerald conveys the exhilaration of when the city opens its doors to you, and you glide from taxi to nightclubs to private apartments in a hazy glow of alcohol and celebrity. There is perhaps no greater feeling. And then the fall, when one’s time in Manhattan begins to seem unreal, like prancing on a stage set, an actor playing a part. “Thus I take leave of my lost city,” Fitzgerald writes. “Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning, it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth.”
This lightning rod of a book was born out of Baldwin’s experiences as a Black man who cycled between the comfort and familial claustrophobia of Harlem and the openness and experimentation of Greenwich Village. It’s also a very New York story in how it centers on a surprising and shocking death, and the group of friends and lovers who try to make sense of the aftermath. Baldwin wanted his prose to read like jazz, and, near the start, he invokes a famous metaphor of “the beat” that we can feel in the city, and which seems to guide the lives of its denizens. His characters—a jazz drummer, a struggling novelist, a Southern belle, an aspiring actor—throw themselves into the streets, the nightclubs, and the music halls in search of pleasure and oblivion. Baldwin’s furious prose conveys a New York existence that is both too much and sometimes exactly what you need.
In these beautiful paired short stories, Franny Glass returns home from college to her family’s apartment on the Upper East Side in the grip of a “little nervous breakdown.” The precipitating event is a date during the weekend of a college football game, when Franny—stepping off the train in a “sheared raccoon coat” that separates her from the “categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt” girls—becomes sickened by the grating presence of her pretentious boyfriend, Lane. In Manhattan, it’s her actor-brother Zooey who ministers to Franny’s psyche, guiding her back toward an acceptance of a broken and imperfect world. These stories set the archetype for a certain kind of New York life—intellectual, fragile, judgmental, glamorous, off-center—that would find expression in the movies of Woody Allen and Wes Anderson, and lodge deep in the hearts of countless literary aspirants.
In December of 1948, Highsmith recorded in her diary an extraordinary encounter with a society woman while working at Bloomingdale’s: “How we looked at each other—this intelligent-looking woman!” She would go home that evening and sketch the plot for what would become The Price of Salt, in which Therese, a young set designer, has an affair with Carol, an elegant, married woman in the midst of a divorce. (This plot was so risky that Highsmith published the novel under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Unlike so many movies and novels of the time, the connection between Therese and Carol does not lead to ruin or condemnation; Highsmith gives a happy ending to her lovers. The book became an underground cult classic, selling more than a million copies in paperback. The novel is filled with the beautiful textures of mid-century New York—furs, suede, cream-colored cars—and also the hidden codes and meanings that play below those surfaces, closer to forbidden desires.
This unusual book has the reputation of being the only book about jazz that jazz musicians actually like. Dyer improvises with the biographical facts, spinning them into a series of fictional portraits of greats such as Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, and Chet Baker. This method gets us close to the spirit of these musicians and feel what it’s like to live within music and to play music out of one’s history, memory, and vices. Harlem, the Village, Broadway, the long avenues, the morning despair, and the hopping nights—the city is part of the story of these jazz lives operating at a different pitch, on a different plane. Throughout, Dyer tosses off virtuoso observations and asides: “With Chet the song did all the work; all Chet had to do was bring out the bruised tenderness that is there in all the old songs.” You finish the book and turn to the first page and play it again.
