New York in fiction . ptions,the novelists who have written of New 3 NEW YORK IN FICTION York life have made very little use of itslocal colour. Certaiu phases of its socio-logical life have been entirely reader who spends very many hourswith books of New York fiction oftenfinds, after wading through a thick vol-ume that at first sight seems as if it mustbe drenched with the s^^irit of the city,nothing l^eyond the information thatsome individual — usually of no vital im-portance to the narrative — lived, let ussay, on West Thirty-seventh Street orsomewhere on the East Side. A resi-
New York in fiction . ptions,the novelists who have written of New 3 NEW YORK IN FICTION York life have made very little use of itslocal colour. Certaiu phases of its socio-logical life have been entirely reader who spends very many hourswith books of New York fiction oftenfinds, after wading through a thick vol-ume that at first sight seems as if it mustbe drenched with the s^^irit of the city,nothing l^eyond the information thatsome individual — usually of no vital im-portance to the narrative — lived, let ussay, on West Thirty-seventh Street orsomewhere on the East Side. A resi-dence on West Thirty-seventh Street isquite meaningless, and the East Side is very vast and unsatisfying and non-committal. The fault, however, does notlie entirely with the novelists. It was in 1807 that the City Commis-sioners, with a curious disregard of whatsucceeding generations of New Yorkersmight have to say in the matter, mappedout the entire island north of WaverleyPlace into squares. Then and there was 4. NEW YORK IN FICTION dealt a vital blow to the fiction that wasto deal with the citys life. Since thattime New York has undergone almostwith every decade kaleidoscopic neighbourhoods have become ob-solete. It is only of recent years that thetraditions and the associations of the oldtown have had a meaning, that thestreets have been more than mere thor-oughfares. This change has been largelydue to the revival of interest in the liter-ature dealing with the subject, — to theletters of the late *Felix Oldboy, toMr. Haswells Reminiscences of an Octo-genarkm, to Mr. Thomas Janviers InOld New York, and Mr. Daytons LastDays of Knicl-erhocJier Life. However,the poetic, the symbolic side is York has yet to be shown to us asliving, feverish, incarnate. Every American who has passed histen days in the French capital knows orought to know the Rue Racine, the RueBalzac, the Boulevard Voltaire, the Rue 7 NEW YORK IN FICTION Alexandre Dumas, and so for
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