Writing places

Zinsser, a teacher at the New School and at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, leads readers on a journey through all the places where he has done his writing. His story begins in 1946, with his first job at the New York Herald Tribune, a community of legendary journalists and oddballs. Next comes a period of freelance writing for magazines, which found the writer and his typewriter perched in many unusual locations. He recalls the processes that went into creating the original 1974 edition of his book, On Writing Well, and revising it to keep pace with changes in the language and…