The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You

It has been called Pittsburgh's memoir this book of essays that reveals the soul of the city and the sensibilities of its author. Samuel Hazo's work in this new edition is accompanied by the exquisite photographs of sixteen-year-old, Paige Crawley.

It began as an essay for Carnegie Magazine in the mid-1980s and expanded into a book first published in 1986. The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You took on a life of its own. Now in its 5th edition, updated and expanded by the author, it continues to touch us. As one reader put it, I just finished reading your book, and what you did was write the story of my life.

A city dweller named Aristotle remarked that a story should have a beginning, middle and an end. My memoir of Pittsburgh lacks a beginning and an end, but it assuredly has a middle. Commencing, as Aristotle would have approved, in the midst of things, it manages to stay right there. Since its unity is the unity of a single point of view entwined with anecdotes gathered haphazardly by the simple principle of addition it is what it is a memoir that attempts to suggest that Pittsburgh did not arrive at its present status like Venus on the half shell, but that its present grew out of its past. That past exists in our collective memory if it exists at all. One of Aristotle s successors noted in passing that the past is all we have. He was only half right. We have the present that the past made possible. This memoir is one man s view of that possibility. Samuel Hazo