Among those New Yorkers who made ad hoc plans on Sept. 11, 2001, driven together by emergency and grief, were novelists Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. They’d been introduced a few years back by their mutual editor, Jonathan Galassi, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franzen had an apartment on the Upper East Side. Eugenides lived in Berlin but happened to be staying in the West Village; he was marooned uptown that day, so Franzen offered to put him up. They met on the steps of the New York Public Library, tromped together through streets stunned into silence, found an anonymous Italian restaurant, and commiserated over a changed world.
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