Name That Author

This is the opening sentence of the book New York Magazine recently called the best novel set in New York City:

"On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing Faust at the Academy of Music in New York."

Name that author...or book.

Name That Author #6

"In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York.  It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch.  Striped awnings shaded the windows.  The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair.  The best part of Father's income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks.  Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900's.  Teddy Roosevelt was president."

Name That Author #5

"Alfred was surveying the baggage-claim cavern while pale travelers angled for position at the carousel.  There was a confusion of tread patterns on the linoleum, gray with the pollutants that the rain had brought down.  The light was the color of car sickness.  'New York City!' Alfred said."

Name That Author #4

Dawn in New York has

four columns of mire

and a hurricane of black pigeons

splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans

on enormous fire escapes

searching between the angles

for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth

because morning and hope are impossible there:

sometimes the furious swarming coins

penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those who go out early know in their bones

there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:

they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,

in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises

in an impudent challenge of rootless science.

And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs

as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

Name That Author #3

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,

    That you were gone, not to return again--

Read from the back-page of a paper, say,

    Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

    And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man--who happened to be you--

    At noon to-day had happened to be killed,

I should not cry aloud--I could not cry

    Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place--

I should but watch the station lights rush by

    With a more careful interest on my face,

Or raise my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Name That Author #2

If I don't drive around the park,

I'm pretty sure to make my mark.

If I'm in bed each night by ten,

I may get back my looks again,

If I abstain from fun and such,

I'll probably amount to much,

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.

Name That Author #1

"There are roughly three New Yorks.  There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable.  Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.  Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.  Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.  It is the third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.  Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.  And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference:  each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company."

Name the author.  Answer after the jump.