We live and work, study and learn, and cherish and create culture in a city of history, dreams, legend, and immense immediate vitality. Manahatta isle was a storied place for the Native people who lived and fished and hunted among its wooded hills of solid granite and dozens of freshwater springs. For its earliest European settlers in New Amsterdam and then New York, it quickly became (by 1810) the most populous city in a new country, and its major economic center. All five boroughs of New York City constitute the town, but for purposes of this course we will be focusing on Manhattan. No slender rock-ribbed island has so captured the imagination of writers, native and visiting and based too far away to have ever seen New York. From the first days of American publishing, which began in Philadelphia but soon centered in New York, the city has been the setting for love stories, epic historical fiction, dramatic poems, and plays from the melodramatic to the gritty gangster sort to the ultimate in realism—and the absurd. We will read texts from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in a loosely chronological order. We will also attend readings at the Nuyorican Poets Café and go as a group on the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl (with our meeting in a coffeehouse). Sample works include Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”; Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Manahatta”; Washington Irving, selections from Knickerbocker’s History of New York; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; Ada Limón, “We’d Like the Contract to Be Bilingual”; Anne Nichols, Abie’s Irish Rose; Henry James, Washington Square; Lorraine Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window; and Frank O’Hara, “Walking to Work.”