On How New York Feels: It's like a fairyland that comes alive. New York is very realistic -- thugs, footpaths, gangsters, it's just like being in the London of Charles Dickens. It puts you in touch with the complexities of life and the vastness of human experience. On New York's International Appeal: Well there's so many different things to respond to when you didn't grow up here and you have a more comprehensive view of the whole country so you make something of New York that many people that grew up in New York wouldn't make of it. So there is a sense of its being international. I just wrote this little bitty scene in a novel I'm working on where Scooter, who is in some of my other novels, is coming back up 5th Avenue, and he gets to 59th street and sees the Plaza and the Sherry Netherland, and sees all this, it's international, you see. You think of Nice, you think of Cannes, you think of Monte Carlo, you think of London, you think of Rome, you think of the American Express Card, you think of airlines and things like that when you get there. At the same time, if you're in the Village, you know that certain thing that you dreamed of when you dreamed of the bohemian, the so-called bohemian life of the artist, of the writers, and painters, and so forth, so when you're in the Village and you move out from the direction of Washington Square, you have that -- and when you're back at Washington Square, there's Henry James. There's just so many different areas of New York, I can't pick out one place. On His New York: Black Manhattan didn't mean the same thing to me when I came to New York as it meant back when I was younger and had discovered the new Negro anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. By the time I got to college I was concerned with Manhattan at large, and this was a section that I could find many, many idiomatic cousins and much of the romance still existed for me, but I was approaching Manhattan more from a WPA guide than from Black Manhattan or the New Negro, that's Albert Murray's take on Manhattan. So I was always trying to come to all of Manhattan, all of New York and then I had a special place. When I moved to New York this is the apartment that was most available, it's good, it looks right down just like the spyglass tree, like the chinaberry tree, so I live here because of that, and I'm used to the idiom, and my friend Ralph Ellison used to say, "you wouldn't want to be to far away from the idiom." I don't think I would ever be that far away from it wherever I was. That's how it really fits in. All the foundation is there, in the architecture.		A critic, novelist, and biographer, Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama in 1916. He attended the Tuskegee Institute in the early 1940s, and after a year of graduate studies at NYU, he divided his time between teaching at Tuskegee and serving in the air force. His writing career began in earnest in 1962, when he retired from the military. His first book THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1977, Avon Books) was critically acclaimed. The cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, he is also the author of THE BLUE DEVILS OF NADA (1996, Pantheon Books), THE SEVEN LEAGUE BOOTS(1996, Pantheon Books), and TRAIN WHISTLE GUITAR (1989, Norteastern University Press).