Seven Stories That Captured My Imagination and Inspired Me to Write The New Yorker
Writers and teachers read a lot, and it's not uncommon to run across a story that sticks with you long beyond your discovery of it. You think about it over and over; you go back to a certain book and read it three, four, five more times; and eventually, you want to turn it into a story of your own. Some of these inspirations date back to the 1980s; others I discovered when in 2012 I supervised fifty students working on an assignment I had given them to collaborate on a book exploring the architecture and theological foment in New York City in the 1930s. I spent an entire sabbatical editing their work into a 350-page book. After spending that much time in New York during the 1930s, I decided to stay a while longer.
Frederick Buechner's story of coming to New York as an idealistic young man in Now and Then
Knut Hamsun's novel of a strange visitor and his idiosyncratic behavior changing a city in Mysteries
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's virtuous but fateful decision to return home to Germany on the eve of the WWII
Frank Fisher, the African American student who befriended Bonhoeffer and introduced him to both the sacred and secular culture of Harlem
Fisher--lower left
Bonhoeffer--upper right
The suicide of Dorothy Hale, an actress and socialite, and her circle of glamorous, wealthy, and famous friends--Rosamund Pinchot, Claire Booth Luce (and her husband Henry Luce and daughter Ann Brokaw), Frida Kahlo
Joseph Mitchell, a mercurial writer for The New Yorker in the '30s and '40s whose brilliant profiles of colorful saloons, ministers, longshoremen, and the like remain almost a century later exemplars of the best of literary journalism
A mesmerizing city--New York in 1939--and its World's Fair, with its iconic Trylon and Perisphere, where visitors could see "Democracity," a utopian city of tomorrow
Thirty or forty miles from where you are living today — about half an hour by the new safe-speed boulevard — lies the City of Tomorrow. . . .
. . . Democracity — the City of the Future
Democracity dramatizes the meaning of the Fair: Consciously or not, we are building the World of Tomorrow; creating the symbols of living; not each for himself, but all together.
Hence the double theme of the fair . . . building the World of Tomorrow . . . and the interdependence of man. . . .
It is being built . . . Democracity . . .
Turn the page and see where you will live . . . tomorrow morning. . . .
— from “The World of Tomorrow”
The 1939 New York World's Fair Theme Center Guide Book
​