Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected "Portraits of Grief" from the New York Times - Hardcover

A new edition that now includes the complete New York Times profiles of those who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001

Few aspects of The New York Times’s coverage of September 11 and of all that has followed have attracted as much comment as “Portraits of Grief.” The series profiled the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and was a story in itself, becoming required reading for many the world over.

Beginning on September 14, 2001, a half-dozen Times reporters began working from a stack of one hundred missing persons fliers collected from points around the World Trade Center. They wrote profiles containing short but signature details of the lives they strove to present. These portraits transcend race, class, age, and gender while capturing the poignancy of the victims’ similarities: life cut short in an American tragedy. This new edition includes the complete “Portraits of Grief” series with approximately four hundred additional portraits published since February 3, 2002. The profiles have become a source of connection and consolation, a focus for the sorrow of readers both reeling from disbelief and searching for support.

Over 140 reporters from The New York Times participated in the writing of the paper’s daily feature, “Portraits of Grief,” some for only a couple of days and others for months. Howell Raines, the executive editor of the Times, writes the Foreword for Portraits, and Janny Scott, a reporter on the Times’s Metro desk, writes the Introduction.