Adapted from Zinsser on Friday, The American Scholar's National
Magazine Award-Winning Essay Series
For nineteen months William Zinsser, author of the best-selling On
Writing Well and many other books, wrote a weekly column for the
website of the American Scholar magazine. This cornucopia was devoted
mainly to culture and the arts, the craft of writing, and travels to
remote places, along with the movies, American popular song, email,
multitasking, baseball, Central Park, Tina Brown, Pauline Kael, Steve
Martin, and other complications of modern life. Written with elegance
and humor, these pieces are now collected in The Writer Who Stayed.
If you value vintage journalism of an old-fashioned vividness and
integrity please, please read this book.--Wall Street Journal
Our 'endlessly supple' English language will, Zinsser says, 'do anything
you ask it to do, if you treat it well. Try it and see.' Try him and see
craftsmanship.--George F. Will
Zinsser--who, with On Writing Well, taught a whole lot of us how to
set down a clean English sentence--last year won a National Magazine
Award for his Friday web columns in The American Scholar. They're now
in a collection that's completely charming, impeccably polished, and
Strunk-and-White-ishly brief. He's the youngest 90-year-old you'll read
this week.--New York Magazine
William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer--he
began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in 1946--and is also a
teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in
affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers,
and students. His 17 other books range from memoir (Writing Places) to
travel (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), American popular
song (Easy to Remember), baseball (Spring Training) and the craft of
writing (Writing to Learn). During the 1970s he was at Yale
University, where he was master of Branford College and taught the
influential nonfiction workshop that would start many writers and
editors on their careers. He has taught at the New School, in New York,
his hometown, and at the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism.
