On Beauty: New York is not beautiful. There are beautiful things in it but it's not beautiful. It's not beautiful the way, for example, the parks make Middle London beautiful. It's not beautiful the way Paris is beautiful. What makes New York what it is, is that it's so theatrical. In midtown for example, the whole thing is an explosion of geometry, and everyone who has seen it has tried their best to measure up, to be up to the theatricality of the city. On Brooklyn: Someone said years ago that the longest journey in the world is from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and that is absolutely true. When I go back to Brooklyn now to see people, I am astonished by how utterly different it is from Manhattan. It is another city, in many ways. And even my favorite neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, even there you are full of yearning to lay on the other shore. On Public Education: I went to public school. It never occurred to anybody there was any other way of going. I went to high school, public high school. I went to City College. My whole education, except for graduate work at Columbia, was entirely at the expense of the City of New York. There were free text books. It was wonderful. There was never any of the chagrin which seems to fill the New York public school system today. On the contrary, with teachers, who themselves, very often, were immigrants or the children of immigrants, proud of their new English -- who were pedantic as hell of course, making sure that we never misused a word. And who above all, in the days before television or such things, when the only amusement was reading, encouraged us to read. My kid sister Pearl, who came along in 1922 and has been for many years at Harvard, she and I devoured the public libraries. We used to get forged adult cards so we could get as many books as we wanted. And it was great that way; everybody was reading and writing. I told this story in one of my books: there was a guy on my block with whom I was always fighting. A very nasty fellow because he always wanted to fight. One day to my surprise, he took me to the hallway of my tenement and he said, "I have something to tell you, it's important" -- in a very growling, surly way, and I said, "Yeah," I said, "what?" He said, "I've discovered the most wonderful poet in English." I said, "Really? What's his name?" And he said, "Ezra Pound." We were all very literary -- incredibly so. And I have to say too, that part of what made New York possible was the feeling that we gulped up English, this new world of English literature as if no other existed. On A Lost New York: F. Scott Fitzgerald, from St. Paul, Minnesota, felt more at home in New York than he did in Paris. He loved New York because, as he said, I hope I have it almost right, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." No one ever said anything as good as that about New York. Especially in the 20s, when he was making a lot of money writing for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, of course, drinking his head off and going to a party every night with his crazy wife, getting into the fountain outside the Plaza, he was something out of a musical comedy. The rest of his life, afterwards, was sad. He wrote a wonderful thing about New York called MY LOST CITY. In a way, all of us have a "lost city." As much as I love New York, and as much as I love living here, there is a lost New York for me -- the buildings, the stores, the people, all the things that have gone. There is a lost New York -- I don't know, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a Pollyana about it, saying, "Everything's going to be okay." I'm not at all sure about that, but each of us has a lost New York in his own heart and Fitzgerald expressed that about that particular period.		(1915­1998) Born in New York City, Kazin was one of the most important American literary critics of this century. A graduate of College of the City of New York and Columbia University, his first book, ON NATIVE GROUNDS (1942, Harcourt Brace), is a study of American prose literature with William Dean Howells. He has written 3 memoirs of life in New York City: A WALKER IN THE CITY (1968, Harcourt Brace), NEW YORK JEW (1978, Alfred A. Knopf), and STARTING OUT IN THE 30s (1980, Random House). Kazin's later essay collections include THE INMOST LEAF (1979, Harcourt Brace), and AN AMERICAN PROCESSION (1984, Alfred A. Knopf).