David K. Israel
A Writer Grows in Brooklyn – part 1
by David K. Israel - December 16, 2009 - 9:07 AM

Truman Capote lived in Brooklyn by choice, and so did I, once… Brooklyn Heights, to be more exact. Actually, the Northern part of Brooklyn Heights, if you want to be even more exact. Or, more precisely, Cranberry Street —the little three-block long street where the movies Moonstruck and Three Days of the Condor were filmed.

454541512_a41bd970db_bWhen I first moved to Brooklyn from SoHo some twelve years ago, friends called me a pioneer, as if I’d just announced that I was picking up and moving to Chechnya or Gaza. Now, of course, it’s considered hip to live in Brooklyn. What people don’t realize, however, is that to many writers, Brooklyn always was the hip place to live. For instance, my little brownstone on Cranberry street was two blocks from where Thomas Paine lived and wrote. I was two blocks from where Walt Whitman typeset his Leaves of Grass. I was five blocks from where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I was 20-some-odd blocks from where Marianne Moore penned What are Years? Five blocks from where Hart Crane wrote The Bridge, 13 blocks from where Thomas Wolfe wrote Of Time and the River. Four blocks from where Betty Smith wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ten blocks from where Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salseman. Three blocks from where Anais Nin lived. Five blocks from where Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead. One block from where Carson McCullers wrote Ballad of the Sad Café. Two blocks from where W.H. Auden lived and wrote. Sixteen blocks from where Norman Rosten lived, and less than a block from (my brownstone actually shared a backyard with) the house that Paul and Jane Bowles called home for more than a decade.

And there are a pantload more.

Alfred Kazin, Tennessee Williams, Chaim Potok, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Cristina Garcia, Derek Walcott, Willaim Styron, Hubert Selby, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Paul Auster, Harriet Beacher Stowe and Isaac Basheva Singer have all, at one point or another, lived and worked in Brooklyn. As well as a whole bunch of young authors like Elizabeth Gaffney, Spike Lee, Dave Eggers and Rick Moody. The Jonathans: Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Letham. And up-and-coming authors like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Amy Sohn.

The question is: Why?


Why have so many writers been drawn to Brooklyn ? What is it about the largest of the five boroughs that bedazzles and beguiles? What’s the allure?

Is it that Brooklyn tends to leave you alone—to stay off your back, as a friend of mine is fond of saying? Or is it “the way in which the low lay of the land and open light here, the surfeit of visible sky, puts the bold frenzy and built-in self-importance of city living in some perspective, isolates you on sidewalks or at windows in your own thoughts beneath the wide empty press of a day,” as Brooklyn native and author Charles Siebert has written? Or is it just cheaper rent?

Go ahead and let us know your thoughts on the subject in the comments below and be sure to tune back in tomorrow for the second part of this 2-part post. I can’t promise I’ll have THE answer to the question, but I will have some pretty interesting factoids about some of these great authors. Oh, and by the way, I may have been slightly off on some of the above “two blocks from where…” stuff. Exact addresses were hard to find, but I should be pretty close with most of them.

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Comments (11)

  1. I still dont see how yall do it. It would seem impossible for me to live in a city like New York. I live in a suburb of Fort Worth and when our community hit 30k people I wanted out. I work with folks that have come from that area and they miss it, but I cannot wrap my head around that. They say its too desolate here, which is why I like it. No noise, horns, traffic, crowded sidewalks and people fighting and yelling at each other. When I go on my backporch, all I can hear is crickets and the wind blowing. Oh well, to each his own. I do admire you guys that have the bravery to live in the big city, I just couldnt handle it.

    posted by Crow88 on 12-16-2009 at 9:48 am

  2. Small correction: it’s Carson McCullers, not McCuthers.

    posted by Amber on 12-16-2009 at 10:32 am

  3. @Amber – fixed! if it helps, i once spelled my name David Isreal… ;-)

    posted by David K. Israel on 12-16-2009 at 10:34 am

  4. I don’t really have any answers but I originally grew up in a small town in way upstate NY, went to school in DC and relocated to Cincinnati. I always felt like Manhattan was too claustrophobic and I hated NYC in general but Brooklyn just feels differently. The fact that there’s visible sky, trees, parks, a vibrant cultural scene, actual neighborhoods and cheaper rents make it all the more appealing. So although I can’t really articulate the reasoning behind it, it just seems different. I’m actually moving there a month from now and couldn’t be more excited. I wish I could say there was some super deep meaning for me moving but I’m kind of looking forward to reading other peoples’ responses…who am I kidding, I just don’t want to miss another Mental Floss live event.

    posted by Nick on 12-16-2009 at 10:41 am

  5. Brooklyn isn’t the largest of the five boroughs – Queens is. Brooklyn has the largest population.

    posted by Genius on 12-16-2009 at 11:02 am

  6. Another is Harlan Ellison — he moved to NYC and ran with Brooklyn gangs in the ’50s to research what would become “Web of the City” and “The Deadly Streets” a decade before making it big with his twisted short stories and Hollywood screenplays.

    posted by Mark on 12-16-2009 at 11:17 am

  7. For me, cheaper rent. I live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens and a) feel completely isolated from “Brooklyn” as it’s written about and b) feel no more writerly inspiration in my apartment or coffeeshops (although there are none nearby) than I feel in Manhattan. I wish it weren’t so.

    posted by Zach Dionne on 12-16-2009 at 12:14 pm

  8. My experience with Brooklyn is extremely limited-I visited my sister when she lived in Park Slope and then again in Fort Green-but I felt like I started to get a feel for the personality that makes it unique. My first impressions were that there was a sense of community that juxtaposed the anonymity you feel in Manhattan. I was treated with a genuine friendliness that might result from living in a population-dense area, as opposed to being a cultural value like Southern hospitality. The people there also struck me as having a worldliness that would result from growing up in neighborhoods that more closely resemble the American melting pot fantasy instead of the mixed salad reality, as well as being in such close proximity to everything the booming metropolis of Manhattan has to offer. If I had to pinpoint it, I would guess that the combination of security and familiarity associated with community and the availability of intellectual exchange might appeal to the stereotype of the pensive, observant, curious writer. Either that, or they are just too broke to live in Manhattan.

    posted by Jessica on 12-16-2009 at 1:45 pm

  9. Do you suppose that Brooklyn breeds writers, or that some writers just end up in Brooklyn?

    As a resident myself, I suspect it’s a little of both: I wrote before I got to Brooklyn, and I’ve been writing since I arrived in Brooklyn. All that changed is my location…and maybe some of the subject matter. (And maybe having a little more space and directly sunlight to write.)

    However, this guy has a pretty good take on it:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Whitehead-t.html?pagewanted=all

    posted by Stephanie on 12-16-2009 at 2:35 pm

  10. i lived n concord st, for a spell, and later on ocean ave and ave U…brooklyn has a style all its own

    posted by brian on 12-16-2009 at 6:31 pm

  11. My family first came to Brooklyn by way of writers nearly a century ago…Yiddish writers. It was an escape from the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side of the time; it almost seemed like it was an escape. It has changed a bit since then.

    posted by LaurenJoy on 12-21-2009 at 12:24 am

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