The public face of Washington—the gridiron of L'Enfant's avenues, the buttoned-down demeanor Sloan Wilson's archetypal "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", the monumental buildings of the Triangle—rarely gives up the secrets of this city's rich life. But beneath the surface there are countless stories to be told. From the early swamp days to the Civil War, the "gilded age" to the New Deal and McCarthy era, as the center of world power to its underlying multicultural social fabric, Washington is a writer's town. Finally, in Literary Washington D.C., the story of the city is finally told. Contributors include: Henry Adams, Louisa May Alcott, A. R. Ammons, Maya Angelou, Gertrude Atherton, Ann Beattie, Suzanne Berne, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Connie Briscoe, Sterling Brown, Alan Cheuse, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Allen Drury, John Rollin Edge, Mathilde Eiker, Christopher Farley, Marita Golden, Patricia Browning Griffith, Robert Hayden, Essex Hemphill, Langston Hughes, Henry James, Randall Jarrell, Ward Just, Garrison Keillor, Ernest Kroll, Margaret Leech, Archibald MacLeish, Julia MacGruder, Larry McMurtry, Mark Merlis, Ernest Morris, V. S. Naipaul, Howard Nemerov, Katherine Anne Porter, Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Richards Shreve, Frances Trollope, Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Walt Whitman, Edmund Wilson, and Marcella Comes Winslow.