Riding the New York Subway: The Invention of the Modern Passenger— Stefan Höhne (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2021, 373 pp.)

Historians looking for first-hand accounts of the experience of riding the New York subway have their work cut out for them. Such information is elusive. Recently, we were given a small vignette of what was once going on in the mind of the well-known American fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. In 1943, at age 18, she traveled from her home in rural Milledgeville, Georgia, to New York City. Riding on the New York subway, she ensured that her two female cousins sat on either side of her lest she is placed next to a Black person. The arrangement was reported back to her mother in letters she sent home. Published in 2014, they are a window into Flannery’s racism.