The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City

Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction

From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it-now in paperback.

In Sam Roberts's pulsating history of the world's most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you've probably never heard of-just in time for the city's 400th birthday.

The New Yorkers introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. It reveals the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was imperiously banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.

Some deserved monuments, but their grandeur was overlooked or forgotten. Others shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution, but discreetly. Virtually all have vanished into New York's uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts-or is better at bringing its history to life.

Author: Sam Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 11/19/2024
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 8.28h x 5.55w x 1.06d
ISBN: 9781639733712

About the Author
Sam Roberts, a 50-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and former Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times "Close Up" on TV, and the podcasts "Only in New York," anthologized in a book of the same name, and "The Caucus." He is the author of A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, and Grand Central, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York, and Air Mail. A history adviser to Federal Hall, he lives in New York.