Culture of Brooklyn

Harlem Renaissance playwright Eulalie Spence taught at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn from 1927 to 1938, a time during which she wrote her critically acclaimed plays Fool's Errand, and Her.

The novels of Henry Miller include reflections on several of the ethnic German and Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn during the 1890s and early 20th century; his novels Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion include long tracts describing his childhood and young adulthood spent in the borough.

Arthur Miller's 1955 play A View From the Bridge, and Paule Marshall's 1959 novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, about Barbadian immigrants during the Depression and World War II, are both set in Brooklyn.

More recently, Brooklyn-born author Jonathan Lethem has written several books about growing up in the borough, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude.

The neighborhood of Park Slope is home to many contemporary writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, Kathryn Harrison, Paul Auster, Franco Ambriz, Nicole Krauss, Colson Whitehead, Darin Strauss, Siri Hustvedt and Suketu Mehta, among others.

Around that time other Hollywood films also depicted Brooklyn of that era and milieu, like the dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace.

Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta, a 1977 movie which defined the Disco era in the United States, was set in Bay Ridge, an Italian neighborhood in southern Brooklyn.

Working class Jewish communities were depicted in films like 1977's Annie Hall and 1986's Brighton Beach Memoirs.

Lynn Nottage's 1995 play Crumbs from the Table of Joy is set in post-World War II Brooklyn and deals with the hopes and frustrations of an African American family recently arrived from Florida.

[4] Brooklyn served as the birthplace of hip hop's Beast Coast movement from the early 2010's and onward, with its key members being associates and long-time friends.

The only such New York State institution accredited by the American Association of Museums, it is one of the few globally to have a permanent collection - 30,000+ cultural objects and natural history specimens.