Bronx Accent: A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough

Winner of the New York Society Library Book Award for Borough History and the Hermalyn Award for New York Urban History "Anyone interested in urban history, in American literature or, more generally, in how people shape—and, in turn, are shaped by—place, will find Bronx Accent a fascinating book. Like some ingenious choral arrangement, the book contains scores of voices recounting, in fact and fiction, how life was lived in the Bronx from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century."—The New York Observer For the last three hundred years, and through all its various social and economic transformations, The Bronx has been a major literary center that many prominent writers have called home.

Bringing together a wide variety of past literary figures as well as emerging talents, this comprehensive book captures the Zeitgeist of the neighborhood through the eyes of its writers. Included are selections from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Wolfe, Herman Wouk, Theodore Dreiser, Washington Irving, Clifford Odets, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaim Potok, Kate Simon, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Aleichem.

Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger place the literature of these and other writers in historical context and reproduce one hundred vintage photographs and postcard views that bring the writings to life. Filtered through the imaginations of authors of different times, ethnic groups, social classes, and literary styles, the borough of The Bronx emerges not only as a shaper of destinies and lives, but as an important literary mecca.