‘Make your mark in New York and you are a made man’ wrote Mark Twain, encapsulating both the naked ambition of its citizens and the opportunities up for grabs in the Big Apple. Others take a more cynical approach: it’s ‘an aviary over-stocked with jays’ (O. Henry), ‘a sucked orange’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson) or ‘fantastically charmless and elaborately dire’ (Henry James). Over the last three-and-a-half centuries this glamorous, twenty-four hour city has attracted a multitude of thinkers, poets, novelists and playwrights, many of whom have brilliantly encapsulated its unique spirit through verse, prose or the ultimate wisecrack.
