New York Nocturne

We'd be remiss as NYC lit bloggers if we didn't note the recent two-part Q&A series on the Times's City Room blog, in which William C. Sharpe, an English professor at Barnard, takes questions on the city at night. In November, Princeton UP published his book New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography.

Sample exchange:

Your books sounds like a fascinating study, Dr. Sharpe. A few years ago, I took a course comparing the literature of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the professor noted that both writers used their experiences of the built environments of London and St. Petersburg in their works of fiction. Dickens in particular was known for walking the streets of London at night by himself. I wonder if there are writers in your study that also walked the streets of New York City at night (in good and not-so-good neighborhoods, like Five Points?) and incorporated those experiences into their works of art or literature?

-- Posted by Roseann F.

The activity of walking the night streets to stimulate creativity and shake off depression seems to be as old as the city itself. The New York contribution begins with George Foster, who published a guide called "New York by Gas-Light" in 1850, and Walt Whitman, who even as he praised the darkened city in his early poem "The Sleepers" (1855) was warning people in his journalistic articles, "Don't go wandering about the streets or parks unnecessarily in the evening" because "New York is one of the most crime haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom." While there are plenty of writers who walked at night -- such as Stephen and Hart Crane, Federico Garcia Lorca and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he might have been too drunk to notice much) -- I more readily think of the painters, such as Edward Hopper, who was able to paint "Nighthawks" because he was one, or Willem de Kooning, who strolled through Chelsea with the poet Edwin Denby during the Depression and showed him how to look at the "dispersed compositions" on the sidewalk: "spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon light."

Rest of the series here and here.