As writers' lives go, William Zinsser's has been a big and crowded one, full of color, noise, character -- and place.

At 86, Zinsser has just finished his 18th book, about all of the unlikely locations he's found himself, as a reporter, writer and teacher. It's a gracefully written work that will, if anything, make you want to go back and read the other 17.

"Writing Places" is all over the place, or, rather, its narrator is: In a grimy newsroom, in a tent in the Sahara, a Tahiti cottage, a London flat, the "billiard house" at an aging summer cottage on Eastern Long Island and in the stony Gothic "master's house" at Yale University.

		WRITING PLACES: THE LIFE JOURNEY OF A WRITER AND TEACHER By William Zinsser Harper ($22.99)

A Princeton-educated son of privilege, Zinsser declined to go work for the family business after military service. Instead, he talked his way into a job at the New York Herald Tribune in 1946. Almost immediately he began entertaining readers with features about the shad running in the Hudson River, the new acrobats at the circus or the Queen Mary doing a "turnaround" that took 24 hours.

In the 1950s, as the Trib's drama editor, he mentored unknown young writers such as Roger Kahn and Judith Crist, while in the 1960s, as a freelance writer for Life or Look he wrote about Peter Sellers or Spike Mulligan, when he wasn't reporting about the Mau-Mau revolt in Kenya or the hippies of Haight-Ashbury. There he was taken to the rehearsals in a tiny studio for the first album by a band calling itself the Grateful Dead.

That's a lot of writing places.

Then there were the books about jazz, Broadway, baseball (1989's "Spring Training" was about the Pittsburgh Pirates) and, most notably, "On Writing Well," a classic book about the craft (not art) of writing, the hard work of it, the rewriting, the revising, the brain freezes, the flashes of inspiration, the hamhanded editors and the good editors, too.

"On Writing Well" sold more than a million copies, and there were other books, later, about writing for children and the memoir. Zinsser was, and is, a teacher, too, a legendary one: His plainly titled "nonfiction workshop" at Yale University helped writers such as Christopher Buckley, Mark Singer and Jane Mayer hone their craft.

Today he teaches foreign students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an adult class on memoir-writing at the New School in Manhattan when he's not playing in a monthly jazz combo at the Century Club.

I fondly remember Zinsser's humor column in Life, which he began in 1968.

"I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn't," began one piece, used later in "On Writing Well" as an example of a lead that "keeps tugging the reader from one paragraph to the next," noting that a hot dog might include chicken and ending with a woman's comment, "I don't eat feather meat of no kind."

But Zinsser found the work of a humorist to be difficult "because I wasn't writing in my own voice," he says.

The humorist is condemned to live by invention, constantly clothing himself in a persona that's not his own."

He found that voice, at least the one that seems to have had the most lasting resonance with readers, as a teacher of writing.

He hasn't been content to let "On Writing Well" age on the shelf, though: He's revised it six times, most recently in 2006, updating examples to include more women writers, adjusting, adding chapters as needed on memoir, organization, on writing with a computer.

"Books that teach," Zinsser writes, "if they have a long life, should reflect who the writer has become at later stages of his own long life -- what work he has done and how his thinking has evolved."

Today, in what he calls "this last of his writing places," his office on Lexington Avenue with a plenty of close access to all-night grocery stores, Zinsser receives a steady stream of current and former students, writers, would-be writers, friends and colleagues, a place, he writes, where "all the strands of my life come together."

"Writing Places" is not a long book, but it possesses all the qualities that Zinsser believes matter most in good writing -- clarity, brevity, simplicity and humanity.

If you can get there, it's a good place for any writer to be.