Modern poetry is prose (but it is saying plenty) / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- Imaginary cities : America / Joyce Carol Oates -- City limits, village values : Concepts of the neighborhood in Black fiction / Toni Morrison -- Poetry and the modern city / Stephen Spender -- The poet and the city : Robert Lowell / Helen Vendler -- The puzzle of anti-urbanism in classic American literature / Leo Marx -- New York from Melville to Mailer / Alfred Kazin -- Cities of mind, urban words : the dematerialization of metropolis in contemporary American fiction / Ihab Hassan -- Mythicizing the city / Leslie Fiedler -- Theater and cities / Richard Eder -- The language of the streets / James Baldwin -- Black literature and the Afro-American nation : the urban voice / Amiri Baraka -- Culture confrontation in urban America : a writer's beginnings / Chaim Potok -- A double life : the fate of the urban ethnic / Jerre Mangione -- The city and I / Pedro Juan Soto -- Living with change / David Ignatow -- The city as battleground : the novelist as combatant / Marge Piercy -- The child's perception of the city / Bruno Bettelheim -- Borrowing and lending : the young reader and the library / Joan N. Burstyn -- Literature for youth : the city as heaven and /or hell / M. Jerry Weiss -- A people's paper for the inner city / John Holt.