Additional information
by Ed Simon (Author), Ron Donoughe (Other)
"Europe stretches to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"They are my people and this is my town and it does my heart good just to be here." - Art Rooney Sr.
Pittsburgh contains multitudes. The city bestows a character of contradiction, love of place and strength of community on anyone lucky to be born and raised there. A town whose rivers were once lined with belching steel mills but also hosted the world's first major modern art exhibition is not easily defined. From the decline of the steel industry and the exodus of a vast diaspora of Pittsburghers to its reinvention as a trendy mid-sized metropolis, the ethos of the Steel City remains ever-changing. Across thirteen interconnected essays, author Ed Simon examines the city's identity in all of its minutia--U.S. Steel and the U.S. Steelworkers; dive bars and churches; the black and gold and the Black and white; hills, bridges and inclines; and geography as destiny.
Author Biography
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer for The Millions. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and has taught writing at several institutions of higher education, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University. Simon's work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, Aeon, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Times, among others. He is the author of several books, and his most recent titles include Relic, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology from Abrams; and Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost from Ig Publishing. In the summer of 2024, Melville House will release Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. He has written about his hometown before in An Alternative History of Pittsburgh.
