Manhattan '45

By Jan Morris

Book Overview

On June 25, 1945, 14,000 American servicemen and women sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary. The city that awaited these first returnees from the victory over Nazi Germany stood at a historical climax of power, confidence, hope, and prestige, and yet remained still curiously innocent.
In Manhattan '45, one of the greatest contemporary prose stylists leads us down the gangplank with the returning GIs, and allows us to discover for ourselves the island of Manhattan as it was forty-five years ago. Jan Morris takes us for a ride on the now vanished trollies, the El, and the Hudson River ferryboats, along the way introducing us to characters as disparate as Robert Moses, Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, Jackson Pollock, Mayor La Guardia, and Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village dweller who claimed to speak the language of seagulls. We also encounter Harlem and the Lower East Side; inspect the menu at the legendary Le Pavillon; board the Twentieth Century Limited on Track 34 in Grand Central Station; and swoon to Sinatra at the Paramount.
Capturing the tremendously diverse nature of the city, Morris tells us that she titled the book Manhattan '45 because it sounds "partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne." Her affectionate account vividly depicts the victorious, hopeful, confident, celebratory, and explosive Manhattan of four and a half decades ago.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195066642
• ISBN13: 9780195066647
• Release Date: December 1990
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Required Reading for Lovers of New York

Jan Morris' favorite city is presented in its moment of greatest hope, when the war was won and America was in a blissful state indeed. Morris always writes beautifully of places as characters in and of themselves. These are usually distilled in essay form to show up some single, wonderful characteristic of the place. She's always done that better than any other travel writer, even if it sounds like pigeon-holing. But this amazing book does anything but pigeonhole. Morris has composed a kind of love letter about the city, expanding on race, class, and its sheer motion. There's a great deal of history inside, giving a little background and color to how Manhattan came to be what it was in 1945. Mayors and miscellaneous cranks, celebrities and neighborhood personalities all share the stage. It's a book of history, trivia, memories, gossip, and sheer fun. Gorgeously written. A MUST for Manhattanites and fans of the Big Apple.

Great Sense of Place

Few books on New York's past are as rich and revealing as this work. The author does an excellent job of recreating the sense of place of New York. Urban culture, economy, and race relations are dealt with in a very creative way. I found that while its focus is the New York of the 1940s this book really is about a larger American experience that reaches into our day.