In the early 1990s, when I first met Marshall Berman, he told me he was working on a book called Living for the City  — “after the Stevie Wonder song.”

He’d been thinking about this book for a long while, ever since finishing his masterpiece, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. The problem was he hadn’t written much of it — hadn’t been able to, was paralyzed somehow, blocked.

He’d continued to teach, up in Harlem, at CCNY, and at the CUNY Graduate Center, and plenty else poured out of him — essays and reviews, in the Nation, the Village Voice, and Dissent, discrete pieces written with great verve. But all looked like a pile of fragments, he said, commissioned by some editor or another. Nothing added up. Nothing came from his inner depths, had the psychic immediacy and wholeness of a “book.” Nothing solid stuck as the years since 1982 melted away.