From the New York Times reporter whose beat has been Urban Affairs, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants-just in time for the city's 400th birthday.In Sam Roberts's vast pulsating history, you'll meet the city anew through thirty-one key New Yorkers you've probably never heard of.The New Yorkers introduces us to the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan, the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang, and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. You'll discover the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was remarkably banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.There are some whose forgotten grandeur deserved monuments, others who discreetly shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution-yet all have vanished into its uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts-or is better at bringing its history to life.