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Manhattan Beach began with 9/11
After September 11
After September 11, many people reflected on what it had been like to be in New York during World War II, and a lot of them reread E.B. White's essay Here's New York. That got Jennifer Egan thinking about what it felt like, and she pictured a fun crime story through a noir lens.
Noir and the Docks
Noir, to her, is hardly a genre. It is a mood, and a magnificent one. The mood led her to the waterfront, and the waterfront led to Irish Americans, who completely controlled the Manhattan docks. The movie On the Waterfront arose from a lengthy exposé of those injustices.
Seven Years
Her father, who had been going to be a priest, was long gone by the time she did the research, yet it gave her a sense for the first time of the world that made him, including a tremendous reluctance to talk about emotions. She had no idea what the book would be, bumbled from one thing to the next, and it took seven years.
How did New York's docks hire workers?
For decades, longshoremen gathered at the piers each morning in a system called the shape-up, where a hiring boss picked who would work that day. The system invited kickbacks and favoritism, and it gave gangs a hold over dockworkers. New York and New Jersey created the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor in 1953 to regulate hiring on the docks. Irish Americans had dominated the dock workforce since the waves of Irish immigration in the nineteenth century.
How did On the Waterfront come about?
The film grew out of Malcolm Johnson's 1948 newspaper series Crime on the Waterfront in the New York Sun, which exposed corruption on the New York docks. Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for the series. Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay, and Elia Kazan directed the 1954 film. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Why did people reread E.B. White after 9/11?
White wrote Here's New York in the summer of 1948 for Holiday magazine, and it appeared as a book the next year. In it, he imagines the city's fragility, writing that a single flight of planes could end its existence. After the attacks of 2001, readers returned to that passage and the essay was widely reprinted. Here's New York remains one of the most quoted essays about the city.
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