SOURCE: "Teddy Roosevelt: Literary Feller," in Columbia University Forum, Vol. 6, No. 3, Summer, 1963, pp. 10-16.

An American educator and critic, Moers is the author of The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm (1960) and Literary Women (1976). In the following essay, she documents Roosevelt's relationship to New York's literati during his term as police commissioner of that city.

In the 1890s New York became the literary center of America as it had never been before and perhaps would never be so effectively again. As the center of a publishing revolution, the city could offer three things to men of talent: a living (on newspapers and magazines), an apprenticeship (via journalism to all the arts and idealisms), and a subject matter: the urban poor. This last New York possessed in greater abundance and variety and showed off to greater effect (by contrast with its flashy plutocracy) than any other American city.

The great new...