Writer Who Stayed by William Zinsser

Writer Who Stayed by William Zinsser

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.

William Zinsser began his career as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and went on to write for a variety of publications. Writing to Learn, American Locations, Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz, and Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs are among his seventeen works, in addition to On Writing Well. He was a writer who taught at Yale and the New School. In 2015, William Zinsser passed away.