New York is a city like no other. Through the centuries, she's been embraced and reviled, worshipped and feared, praised and battered-all the while standing at the crossroads of American politics, business, society, and culture. Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter, a lifelong diary enthusiast, scoured the archives of libraries, historical societies, and private estates to assemble here an almost holographic view of this iconic metropolis. Starting on January 1 and continuing day by day through the year, these journal entries are selected from four centuries of writing-revealing vivid and compelling snapshots of life in the Capital of the World.

"Today I arrived by train in New York City . . . and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!"-Edward Robb Ellis, May 22, 1947

Includes diary excerpts from Sherwood Anderson * Albert Camus * Noel Coward * Dorothy Day * John Dos Passos * Thomas Edison * Allen Ginsberg * Keith Haring * Henry Hudson * Anne Morrow Lindbergh * H. L. Mencken * John Cameron Mitchell * Julia Rosa Newberry * Eugene O'Neill * Edgar Allan Poe * Theodore Roosevelt * Elizabeth Cady Stanton * Alexis de Tocqueville * Mark Twain * Gertrude Vanderbilt * Andy Warhol * George Washington * Walt Whitman * and many others

"The most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across."-The New York Times

"A must-read for anyone who has fallen in love with the Big Apple."-New York Journal of Books

"An absolute masterpiece."-The Atlantic