Esther Greenwood, the protagonist and narrator of Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (first published in 1963 in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), doesn't care much for the New York of June of 1953. The budding writer has come to the city to work at a woman's fashion magazine, one of a dozen winners of a national essay competition. She, along with her fellow editors, lives in the Amazon, a proper boarding house for women in midtown Manhattan. She doesn't know what she's doing in the city. In the first chapter, she tells us all she can think about is the execution by electric chair of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New York-born American citizens found guilty of spying for Russia, at the Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. The New York of The Bell Jar is gray, rainy, and flat, a phantasmagoria, an acute visual metaphor for "the man in the grey flannel suit." The fresh air that arrives at night dissolves by morning, givi
A strolling guide to New York City by Teri Tynes