THE PLACES: 1. Tea Lounge 2. Press 195 3. Perch Café 4. Ozzie’s 5. Brooklyn Public Library 6. Brooklyn Writers Space 7. 826NYC 8. Brooklyn Reading Works/ Old Stone House 9. Brooklyn Lyceum 10. Prospect Park 11. Pete’s Candy Store 12. Sunny’s 13. Pacific Standard 14. Moe’s 15. Community Bookstore 16. BookCourt 17. Heights Books 18. Union Hall 19. Brooklyn Social 20. A Public Space 21. One Story 22. n+1 23. Ashbox 24. Roebling Tea Room 25. Atlas Café 26. Café Grumpy 27. Lucky Cat 28. Brooklyn Rail 29. Brooklyn Book Fest 30. Fort Greene Park (A full list of the Brooklyn Literary 100 follows the article. The illustration is by Marcellus Hall.)

The idea of a Brooklyn literary “scene” is one that has become so ingrained in the city’s consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community. Take, for example, Colson Whitehead’s cheeky New York Times Book Review essay—“I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It”—from last month, in which he questioned the very idea that the borough could be said to inspire any kind of literary imagination. He wrote: “There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And … she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still.”

Of course, as Mr. Whitehead himself tacitly acknowledges, writers have long found refuge across the East River (if often for financial reasons). Norman Mailer held his famous late-night parties in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone (his neighbor, for a time, was the playwright Arthur Miller); Truman Capote lived in the neighborhood in the ’50s and ’60s; poet Hart Crane lived in Brooklyn Heights for part of his short life. Poet Marianne Moore lived in a Fort Greene brownstone for decades. In Brooklyn Heights, at 7 Middagh Street, was a writers’ and artists’ commune of sorts that at various points in the 1940s counted Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, W. H. Auden, and Jane and Paul Bowles among its residents. (“I think Auden was kind of the father to the house,” said Evan Hughes, a 32-year-old writer in Fort Greene who is writing a history of literary Brooklyn. “He made sure the bills got paid and whatnot.”) And of course, no mention of literary Brooklyn is complete without reference to its patron saint, Walt Whitman, who first moved to Brooklyn at the age of 4 and made his living as a journalist at a number of local papers while writing poetry.

Still, it’s true that Manhattan—especially the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, and Elaine’s—for years occupied a special place in the city’s literary landscape, and still, today, it’s not surprising to find those neighborhoods clinging to the tops of mastheads, with older authors and senior agents and editors living in the Classic 6 on West End Avenue, where they’ve been since the 1970s. But making the jump across the East River, and onto Carroll Street and Clinton Avenue—along with the assistants and junior staffers and newly minted MFAs—are now the likes of (No. 1 New York Times best-selling author!) Jhumpa Lahiri; Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who famously bought a Park Slope townhouse for $3.5 million in 2005; and the veritable Renaissance man Kurt Andersen, who makes his home in Carroll Gardens. And so they clack away on their MacBooks at Ozzie’s or the Tea Lounge in Park Slope or the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, and do readings at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg or the Brooklyn Lyceum, and contribute to A Public Space or One Story or n+1, and meet their editor for drinks at Union Hall, and play football in Prospect Park on the weekends and tutor kids at 826NYC and buy their friends’ books at the Community Bookstore or Book Court and raise money to fight the Atlantic Yards project by contributing essays to a book called Brooklyn Was Mine, published by Riverhead in January.

Thus a Brooklyn literary community has, stubbornly, taken root, despite Mr. Whitehead’s disavowals, and yet, we wondered just who the members of this community were—everyone from its longtime to its newest denizens. Preemptively, we must warn the reader that the Brooklyn Literary 100, like any list of the Best or Worst, or Most Important or Most Popular or Most Expensive, is necessarily arbitrary to some degree. That being said, there were some criteria that we attempted to hew to. We restricted the list to people we (again, somewhat arbitrarily) deemed “literary.” If a writer, preferably he or she has published a book and/or regularly contributes to a well-known publication, be it magazine, newspaper or blog; if an editor, someone who is either prominent in his or her field or recognized in the book or magazine publishing world as a comer; if an agent, someone who has a client roster that would be at least somewhat recognizable to the average literary follower. But prospective listees also got points (on an undetermined scale in this reporter’s head) for other literary endeavors beyond writing and publishing, such as hosting parties known for their writerly attendees. We surveyed our own bookish acquaintances and trolled the Internet in search of hints that list-worthy people might live in Brooklyn. (Though sometimes our suppositions were wrong: Believer editor Ed Park, for example, lives on the Upper West Side; Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf, Chelsea!) But we must also, once again preemptively, say that we of course missed some people who deserve to be on the list. Next time! And, yes, Mr. Whitehead is on there. Much to his chagrin, we suppose.

Additional reporting by Joe Pompeo

Brighton Beach
Lara Vapnyar, author

Brooklyn Heights
Elizabeth Gaffney, editor, A Public Space; author
Philip Levine, poet
Norris Church Mailer, author
Dinaw Mengestu, author
Simon Rich, author
Valerie Steiker, editor, Vogue

Boerum Hill
John Cassidy, staff writer, The New Yorker; author
Sarah Crichton, editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Emily Gould, blogger, Galleycat; author
Courtney Hodell, editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Samantha Hunt, author
Scott Malcomson, editor, The New York Times Magazine
Lawrence Osborne, author
Jonathan Lethem, author
Katie Roiphe, author
Jonathan Burnham Schwartz, author
Craig Seligman, critic, Bloomberg News; author
Elizabeth Spiers, contributing writer, Fortune; author
Michael Thomas, author

Carroll Gardens
Kurt Andersen, author; radio host; editor-at-large, Random House
Joshua Ferris, author
David Grann, staff writer, The New Yorker; author
Phillip Lopate, author and essayist
Richard Nash, editorial director, Soft Skull Press
Vijay Seshadri, author

Clinton Hill
Molly Barton, editor, Penguin
Susan Choi, author
Laura Ford, editor, Random House
Fiona Maazel, author
Benjamin Nugent, author
Meghan O’Rourke, literary editor, Slate; poetry editor, The Paris Review; poet
Anna Stein, agent, Irene Skolnick and Associates
James Surowiecki, staff writer, The New Yorker; author
Matt Weiland, editor, The Paris Review

Cobble Hill
Geoff Kloske, publisher,
Riverhead
Stephen Metcalf, critic-at-large, Slate
Nathaniel Rich, editor, The Paris Review; author
Eric Simonoff, agent, Janklow & Nesbitt
Alex Star, editor, The New York Times Magazine
Paula Fox, author

Ditmas Park
Roger Hodge, editor-in-chief, Harper’s

DUMBO
Michael M. Thomas, author and essayist

Fort Greene
Jennifer Carlson, agent, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
Bryan Curtis, contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine
Jennifer Egan, author
Sarah Fan, editor, New Press
Ryan Fischer-Harbage, agent,
Fischer-Harbage Agency
Melissa Flashman, agent, Trident Media Group
Amitav Ghosh, author
Emily Haynes, editor, Plume
Brigid Hughes, editor-in-chief, A Public Space
Trena Keating, editor-in-chief, Dutton
Chris Knutsen, editor, Vogue
Jhumpa Lahiri, author
Simon Lipskar, agent, Writers House
Sarah Rainone, editor, Doubleday
Rakesh Satyal, editor, HarperCollins
Emily Takoudes, editor, Ecco
Toure, contributing editor, Rolling Stone; author
Colson Whitehead, author

Gowanus
Paul Ford, editor, Harper’s; author; blogger

Kensington
Daniel Radosh, author; blogger

Park Slope
Paul Auster, author
Jonathan Safran Foer, author
Mary Gannon, editor, Poets & Writers
Ben Greenman, editor, The New Yorker; author
Colin Harrison, editor, Harper’s; author
Kathryn Harrison, author
Steven Berlin Johnson, author; blogger
Edward Kastenmeier, editor, Knopf
Porochista Khakpour, author
Nicole Krauss, author
Megan Lynch, editor, Riverhead
Sarah McGrath, editor, Riverhead
Suketu Mehta, author
Elissa Schappell, contributing editor, Vanity Fair
John Sellers, author
Darin Strauss, author
Alexandra Styron, author
Bill Wasik, editor, Harper’s; author
Larry Weissman, agent, Larry Weissman Literary

Prospect Heights
Mike Albo, author
Julia Cheiffetz, editor, Random House
Becky Cole, editor, Broadway Books
Keith Gessen, editor, n+1; author
Philip Gourevitch, editor-in-chief, The Paris Review; staff writer, The New Yorker; author
Mark Kirby, editor, GQ
Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer, The New Yorker
Rick Moody, author
George Packer, staff writer, The New Yorker; author
Matt Power, author
Laura Secor, author
Paul Slovak, editor, Viking

Red Hook
Philip Nobel, architecture critic; author
Jody Rosen, music critic, Slate; author

Williamsburg
Jami Attenberg, author
Philip Dray, author

Windsor Terrace
Aaron Gell, editor, Radar
Myla Goldberg, author