In the 1970s Paris had fashion, London had the theatre, Berlin had a small painting scene, but New York had all these cultural attainments and more - a vibrant intellectual life. In a decade when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, when local headlines were dominated by urban scandal, corruption and violence, the city flourished as never before as the center of 'uncompromising high culture masquerading as slouching, grinning gee-whiz - Wallace Stevens in sneakers.' The representative figures of this New York were Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, George Balanchine, among others - fierce cultural arbiters, 'martyr's to art' - living in a city that was still obsessed with the hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure. From Isherwood to Mapplethorpe, Borges to Foucault, Brodkey to Burroughs, Edmund White knew them all, and writes about them in New York Boy with love, affection, insight and often biting wit. It is a fascinating, personal journey through the vibrant and explosiv