Ruth McKenney — My Sister Eileen

I read this collection of stories by New Yorker writer Ruth McKenney because it included one about the author's experience living with her eponymous sister in the basement of my new home in the Village. My landlord is the daughter of her landlord in the 1930s. Leonard Bernstein later adapted the book into the musical Wonderful Town whose premiere Eileen died on the way to (along with her husband Nathanael West) in a car crash.

Berenice Abbott, "Gay Street, #14-16 Manhattan" 1937