In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes..

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and sw….

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose..

The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty ….