Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
'Homer and Langley' is the work of E. L. Doctorow's old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.
I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.
I was born in Manhattan on West 12th. My parents were kind of hippies and they did a home birth.
My family originally lived in Brooklyn. Our first apartment was a little place above my father and uncle's hardware store in Coney Island. Now, don't get the impression that we were surrounded by merry-go-rounds, roller coasters and Ferris wheels. Nope, this was a little side street.
I was born and raised in New York City, Manhattan, uptown.
My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.
But one sets of grandparents lived on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx and one lived in Manhattan and I had an aunt and uncle in Queens, so in my heart I was a New Yorker.
I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.
I grew up in Dolton, just south of Chicago, about a 20-minute drive from old Comiskey Park.
In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.