Writers don’t make a lot of money. They don’t live glamorous lives. They want to be near the action. . . . Where to stay?

Evan Hughes’s delightful new book, Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life, is both a geographical history of the famous borough and a collective literary biography. It’s a kind of subway through time, starting with Walt Whitman and stopping at Hart Crane, Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, then on to Edwidge Danticat, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and dozens of others who called Brooklyn home. It’s the kind of book you find yourself sampling here and there, but that would be a mistake because one of its greatest treats is what amounts to a miniature history of 20th century American literature.

When Hughes quotes one-time resident William Styron’s opening to Sophie’s Choice, he pretty much describes what everyone used to feel:

“In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.”

That sentiment — Brooklyn as a second-tier borough, a wannabe Manhattan, a mezzanine to the orchestra of New York — has long since died. But for much of the last hundred and fifty years the idea of Brooklyn as a place for cheap rents or (as Hughes puts it) “as a treehouse with a Manhattan view,” was very much the reason the borough has a literary history at all. Writers don’t make a lot of money. They don’t live glamorous lives. They want to be near the action, but they can’t necessarily afford it. Where to stay? Hmm. Somewhere with a bridge. . . .

Brooklyn’s bohemian atmosphere and cheaper lodgings (read: seedy) made it a place for writers on the fringe of the publishing autocracy, including black writers — most famously, Richard Wright. Wright was a brief part of the well-told shenanigans at Middagh Street, the so-called February House whose tenants at one time or another included Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis (a la Capote’s Answered Prayers), Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, and Gypsy Rose Lee, among others.

The borough’s reputation may have started to change in the 1950s. Certainly by 1959, when Truman Capote wrote his famous essay, “A House on the Heights,” (which he boldly begins: “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.”) the gauntlet was already down. The borough was asserting its independence from frivolous Manhattan and proclaiming its own grittier sense of literary identity. By the time the seventies roll around, writers are settling in Brooklyn for its own virtues — its quiet streets of classic brownstones and sense of working community, its refuge from the shallow sparkle of Manhattan.

Hughes has done a tremendous amount of homework, culling the relevant parts of scores of biographies, essays, novels, and poems. But the effort hasn’t made his book dry in any sense of the word. You’ll find yourself moving from chapter to chapter, into and out of your favorite writers, and that’s part of the purpose, I think. At first “. . . And the Story of American City Life” seems a very grand phrase for what Hughes does essentially in passing, as he can fit a broader history into each chapter centered on a specific writer, neighborhood, and decade. But by the end the book, the reader’s amassed a living sense of the borough as a home for writers and a breeding ground of some of the best literary work in the last century. Hughes’s cumulative history is one of the best things about the book.

In passing, I want to laud this new-ish trend by major trade publishers to release original paperbacks of first-rate books whose authors or topics may not have built enough of an audience, but that deserve to get out there. FSG published Elif Batuman’s series of essays on Russian literature, The Possessed, last year to excellent reviews. Picador released The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, which went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award. Tom Paizza’s Devil Sent the Rain has just come out from HarperPerennial, containing essays pre- and post-Katrina on music and literature. Dan Fante’s memoir about his father, Fante. Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. The list goes on. New Directions has been doing this for decades, of course, but it’s nice to see other houses catching on.