Where have all the writers gone?  To Brooklyn, no doubt.  At least a convincing case for the literary magnetism of that New York borough is made by journalist and critic Evan Hughes.  He should know too: he lives in Brooklyn.

Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Henry Holt & Company, releasing Aug. 16, 2011), is part literary history --- a series of insightful profiles of writers who made their homes both literally and lyrically in the Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and other neighborhoods of the borough --- part urban history, and part literary analysis.  Reading it is a bit like having an engrossing (if mostly one-sided) conversation with a neighbor steeped in the history of a place and its literary people, well-known writers like Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, and Truman capote, and lesser known figures such as Marianne Moore, Richard Wright, and Paul Auster, spanning a time period from the mid-nineteenth century to the current day, from Leaves of Grass to Sophies Choice to the contemporary novel Great House, and from a Brooklyn which was a quiet village of 5000 in Whitman's early years to a city in urban decline in the Sixties to the mixed and often gentrified brownstones and Starbucks of today.  The author moves through much time and space in the course of some 284 pages, and yet the pacing seems appropriate, slow enough to take in the sights and sounds that inhabit the pages and yet quick enough not to bog down in minutia.  The author's thesis --- that the literature of Brooklyn's writers has a special ability to offer an intimate view of a time and place --- is well taken.  He ably shows how these writers brought this place to life.

While it may be quite a time-span to cover, the details are not glossed over but often recorded.  For example, imagine Walt Whitman humming arias as he walked down the street, or shouting out lines from Shakespeare or Homer from a stagecoach or at the seashore.  We're given a list of streets on which he lived, one with an actual address where the home stills stands, and we begin to put a literary giant on the ground, a human being not a god, after all (regardless of what he thought of himself).  Hughes has a way of always rooting the authors he discusses in houses and on streets with names, some of which still resound.  That's just what these writers would do, what all good writers do.

In addition to watching a village grow into a city, there are many authors to discover about whom I have had little to no knowledge.  Take Richard Wright, the author of the 1945 memoir, Black Boy.  Amazingly enough, at publication of Wright's landmark book, Brooklyn was only 4% black, something that came to change over the ensuing years as blacks migrated north from the South.  Few people at that time (and virtually none of them black) had recounted the racism and poverty of the South with such raw emotion as did Wright.  Because of Hughes, I'll read Wright's book, even if I'm coming to it a bit late.

It's impossible to read about the lives of writers, or any artists for that matter, without an overpowering sense of the hardship, tragedy, and excesses that overshadow their lives, much of it their own doing, and much of it reflected in and influenced by the state of the city around them.  A bohemian lifestyle and often fascination with radical causes is common.  Good writers, yes, but one suspects they may not all have been good neighbors, angst-ridden as they often are.  Perhaps Thomas Wolfe summed up their longing well when he spoke of the search for a "father," not just literally but also metaphorically in a longing for "the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger."  Were one to approach these writers from a theological viewpoint, perhaps all of what they did and wrote is about the longing for meaning, for a father-god around whom to orient their lives.  Alfred Kazin may have said that "[s]alvation would come by the word, the long-awaited and fatefully exact word that only the true writer would speak," and yet reading of the unhappiness that many of these writers experienced, one may have to conclude that salvation must be by some other means, some other Word.  Art may illuminate, but it does not save.  Perhaps as Hughes concludes, "in the end we comprehend just a little bit better the whole incomprehensible whirl of American life," or perhaps these writers only draw attention to its emptiness.  It's a beginning.

I recommend Literary Brooklyn both for its attentiveness to writers and to place, to the words that open up life in one very American city and thereby illuminate them all.  You may not have been to Brooklyn.  Nor may you have read many of the writers told of here.  Yet if you read this book you'll better be able to see the house, street, and neighborhood outside your door and be challenged to both read and write of your own unique place.  You may even better know what questions to ask about your own life and how to look for answers.