Supreme City
Donald L. Miller treats 1920s Midtown Manhattan as the laboratory where modern America was assembled. He follows builders, broadcasters, gangsters, and showmen, including David Sarnoff at RCA, Walter Chrysler raising his tower, Texas Guinan running her nightclubs, and Florenz Ziegfeld staging his follies. The book traces how new technologies, money, and migration crowded into a few square miles north of Forty-second Street and produced skyscrapers, radio networks, and an entirely new urban culture. Miller writes in a brisk, scene-driven style and connects the personalities to the wider city around them. The book is panoramic but always grounded in walkable streets and named addresses.
What you might want to know about Supreme City
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Donald L. Miller tells the story of how Midtown Manhattan in the 1920s became the cultural and commercial capital of the modern world.
On his One Grand Books list Hanks wrote that after reading it you will never see NYC the same and will never be without a destination to go visit.
Both. Miller braids the rise of Midtown skyscrapers and infrastructure with the lives of the broadcasters, builders, and entertainers who filled them.
Supreme City was written by Donald L. Miller, published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.
Supreme City is 784 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Supreme City takes most readers 12 to 17 hours to finish.
Supreme City is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.