Part biography, part memoir, part belles lettres--this wonderful book celebrates the act of reading, the writers whose work awakened the soul of a young man growing up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, and the history of the city itself. Reading New York opens with 12-year-old John Tytell, confined by eye problems to a darkened room, discovering Billy Budd, sailing Melville's ocean by flashlight in bed. Vividly capturing the excitement of his first encounter with a masterpiece, Tytell goes deeper to expose the heart of Melville's story and of the writer's life. He weaves the same kind of spell--from memory, language, and experience--in evoking his encounters with the work of the other writers who figured as milestones in his own coming of age: Poe, Whitman, Henry Miller, Henry James. And completing the book's vivid narrative is Tytell's story: his family's flight from Antwerp after the Nazi invasion, his own life in New York--as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult still moved by the books that helped shape him. Acclaimed for his biographies of Ezra Pound and the Beats, Tytell now gives us a brilliant hybrid: acutely perceptive literary criticism that is, as well, an intimate exploration of the experience of literature, and of a city steeped in literary lorc.