On Writing Well is a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose. -New York Times

A beloved classic, this definitive volume on the art of writing nonfiction celebrates its thirtieth anniversary.

On Writing Well, which grew out of a course that William Zinsser taught at Yale, has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity, and for the warmth of its style. It is a book for anybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does. Whether you want to write about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts, or about yourself in the increasingly popular memoir genre, On Writing Well offers you both fundamental principles as well as the insights of a distinguished practitioner. With over a million copies in print, this volume has stood the test of time and remains a valued resource for writers and would-be writers.

From the author of On Writing Well comes a book on how to write clearly aboutany subject--and how to use writing as a means of learning.

On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity, and its warmth of style. It is a book for anybody who wants to learn how to write, whether about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts, or about yourself. Its principles and insights have made it a cherished resource for several generations of writers and students.

This revised 30th anniversary edition contains a new introduction and a new chapter on how to write a family history or a memoir.

An ingeniously constructed teaching memoir from the author of the bestselling On Writing Well -- You learn without knowing it. (Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes)
Written with elegance, warmth, and humor, this highly original teaching memoir by William Zinsser--renowned bestselling author of On Writing Well gives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. They are the same decisions you'll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.

William Zinsser turns his zest, warmth and curiosity--his sharp but forgiving eye--on his own story. The result is lively, funny and moving, especially for anyone who cares about art and the business of writing well.
--Evan Thomas, Newsweek

In Writing Places, William Zinsser--the author of On Writing Well, the bestseller that has inspired two generations of writers, journalists, and students--recalls the many colorful and instructive places where he has worked and taught. Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life, calls Writing Places, Wonderful, while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praises this unique memoir for possessing all the qualities that Zinsser believes matter most in good writing--clarity, brevity, simplicity and humanity.

Spring training, a time when every team is in first place, is an American tradition dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. William Zinsser vividly brings to life the unique, once-a-year relationship between Bradenton, Florida, and its adopted team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1988 the Pirates were an unproven yet promising bunch with high hopes of competing for the National League pennant. Given rare access to players, management, scouts and umpires, Zinsser sought to discover how a team prepares for the longest season in professional sports. As valid today as it was when first published, Spring Training reveals how the fundamentals of baseball are taught and learned. The author has added a new introduction and postscript, which includes a lengthy interview with manager Jim Leyland about the lessons that can be learned from losing.

Adapted from Zinsser on Friday, The American Scholar's National Magazine Award-Winning Essay Series

For nineteen months William Zinsser, author of the best-selling On Writing Well and many other books, wrote a weekly column for the website of the American Scholar magazine. This cornucopia was devoted mainly to culture and the arts, the craft of writing, and travels to remote places, along with the movies, American popular song, email, multitasking, baseball, Central Park, Tina Brown, Pauline Kael, Steve Martin, and other complications of modern life. Written with elegance and humor, these pieces are now collected in The Writer Who Stayed.

If you value vintage journalism of an old-fashioned vividness and integrity please, please read this book.--Wall Street Journal

Our 'endlessly supple' English language will, Zinsser says, 'do anything you ask it to do, if you treat it well. Try it and see.' Try him and see craftsmanship.--George F. Will

Zinsser--who, with On Writing Well, taught a whole lot of us how to set down a clean English sentence--last year won a National Magazine Award for his Friday web columns in The American Scholar. They're now in a collection that's completely charming, impeccably polished, and Strunk-and-White-ishly brief. He's the youngest 90-year-old you'll read this week.--New York Magazine

William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer--he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in 1946--and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students. His 17 other books range from memoir (Writing Places) to travel (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), American popular song (Easy to Remember), baseball (Spring Training) and the craft of writing (Writing to Learn). During the 1970s he was at Yale University, where he was master of Branford College and taught the influential nonfiction workshop that would start many writers and editors on their careers. He has taught at the New School, in New York, his hometown, and at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

This inspiring guide includes places everyone means to go to some day, all described with the usual clarity of the author of On Writing Well.--The New York Times

A fascinating take on 'the search for memory' and how certain places have come to symbolize deep American principles.--Kirkus Reviews

Join William Zinsser as he visits sixteen of our nation's most treasured historic sites--unlearning cliched assumptions and rediscovering fundamental truths about America. American Places--and the ideals that Zinsser discovers these places represent--will never go out of fashion.

Speaking across the centuries with stone and symbol, narrative and myth, America's iconic places remind us of our anchoring principles and best intentions. 'This is where we started and what we believed and who we hoped to become, ' these places say. At least that's what they said to me.

Niagara Falls existed only in the attic of my mind where collective memory is stored: scraps of songs about honeymooning couples, vistas by painters who tried to get the plummeting waters to hold still, film clips of Marilyn Monroe running for her life in Niagara, odds and ends of lore about stuntmen who died going over the falls, and always, somewhere among the scraps, a boat called Maid of the Mist, which took tourists...where? Behind the falls? Under the falls? Death hovered at the edge of the images in my attic, or at least danger. But I had never thought of going to see the place itself. That was for other people. Now I wanted to be one of those other people.--from American Places

American Places paints vivid word pictures that put you in those places and make you feel that you've been there, but it also encourages each of us to take our own trek through history.--Riverside Press-Enterprise

Zinsser's choices and descriptions are refreshing because of the obvious thought that went into the selections. It's also fun to read Zinsser's observations.--Chicago Tribune

William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer--he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in 1946--and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students. His 17 other books range from memoir (Writing Places) to travel (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), American popular song (Easy to Remember), baseball (Spring Training) and the craft of writing (Writing to Learn). During the 1970s he was at Yale University, where he was master of Branford College and taught the influential nonfiction workshop that would start many writers and editors on their careers. He has taught at the New School, in New York, his hometown, and at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In this deeply felt book, nine American writers and thinkers from different points of the religious compass discuss how their work is nourished by spiritual concerns. Diana Ackerman explains why she calls herself a messenger of wonder and how, in her observations of the natural world, there is a form of beholding that is a kind of prayer. David Bradley recalls how his inheritance as the son, grandson and great-grandson of black preachers has enabled him, at considerable pain, to be touched by the word. Frederick Buechner makes an intensely personal journey to his roots as a novelist: In fiction, as in faith, something outside ourselves is breathed into us if we're open enough to inhale it. Allen Ginsberg describes how his poetry is grounded in the Buddhist idea of renunciation of hand-me-down conceptions and the meditative practice of letting go of thoughts. Mary Gordon retraces an odyssey in which the religious beliefs and forms of a Catholic girlhood turned out to be as useful as a wiretap to the grown-up novelist. Patricia Hampl describes how the writing of Virgin Time took her on a series of pilgrimages to explore the contemplative life. Hillel Levine tells of his search for the mystery of goodness, exemplified by a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved thousands of Jews on the eve of World War II. Hugh Nissenson explains how his work as a Jewish writer has been animated by a sense of the holy and shaped by the poetry, drama and narrative of the King James Bible. Jaroslav Pelikan revisits three religious writers--Augustine, Newman, and Boethius--whose influence on other religious writers over the centuries has never gone out of fashion. Together, as William Zinsser notes in his introduction, these writers are on a pilgrimage to find the source of their faith as individuals and their strength as artists.

Highly recommended--Library Journal

In this account of the world adventures of two splendid jazz artists, Bill Zinsser has given us one of the most exciting books about America's original art form that I've ever read. It's a revelation.--Studs Terkel

Since 1955, Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff have been playing, teaching, and sharing jazz around the U.S. and around the world. William Zinsser, one of our finest chroniclers of American life, tells their story as he travels with the duo to China, to Davenport, Iowa, to New York City, and--with Willie Ruff--to St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, where Ruff journeys back to the roots of Western music in order to understand jazz's musical legacy.

Zinsser also accompanies Mitchell and Ruff as they visit their hometowns in Florida and Alabama. We listen as the two men tell of growing up in small towns in the American South of the 1930s and 40s; as they tell about the teachers, community leaders, and family members who believed in two young black men with talent but no formal musical training; as they tell of their struggles, their perseverance, and their ultimate success.

Jazz is indeed a uniquely American musical tradition, and there are no better guides to this inspiring art than Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff.

[This is a] thoughtful, adept, and satisfyingly unusual book of reportage...Though its contents are entirely factual, it concerns lives that give the sense of being but fatefully, imaginatively, arranged, and it constantly suggests improvisation--that is, 'something created during the process of delivery, ' as Mr. Ruff explains the term to the Chinese...He also tells them improvisation is 'the lifeblood of jazz.' William Zinsser's book reminds us that improvisation is the lifeblood of life, too. [This book is also] about difficult passages that end in victorious arrival. Mitchell & Ruff is a deservedly happy book.--New York Times Book Review

A highly infectious, Studs Terkel-like chronicle about the unorthodox development of two distinguished musicians.--Publishers Weekly

Jazz came to China for the first time on the afternoon of June 2, 1981, when the American bassist and French-horn player Willie Ruff introduced himself and his partner, the pianist Dwike Mitchell, to several hundred students and professors who were crowded into a large room at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Probably they were not surprised to find that the two musicians were black...What they undoubtedly didn't expect was that Ruff would talk to them in Chinese.--from Chapter 1, Shanghai

William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer--he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in 1946--and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students. His 17 other books range from memoir (Writing Places) to travel (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), American popular song (Easy to Remember), baseball (Spring Training) and the craft of writing (Writing to Learn). During the 1970s he was at Yale University, where he was master of Branford College and taught the influential nonfiction workshop that would start many writers and editors on their careers. He has taught at the New School, in New York, his hometown, and at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Albert Murray is a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist. He has taught at several colleges, including Colgate, Barnard, and Tuskegee. Mr. Murray's works include The Omni-Americans, South to a Very Old Place, Train Whistle Guitar, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Seven League Boots.