His critically acclaimed novel Free City (WW Norton, 1996) was subsequently published in German and Spanish translations. Darton’s cultural history, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center (Basic Books, 2000) became a New York Times bestseller. He was feaured in The History Channel's documentary World Trade Center, 1973-2001 (2001). In the wake of September 11, he made scores of public and media appearances. Most recently he published Beaky Chronicles, twelve animal fables for adults illustrated by Katie Kehrig.

Darton’s papers and talks include “Arcadian Rhythms in the Concrete Jungle: Utopian New York From the Automat to Adam Purple and Beyond” for the New York Public Library-Bibliothèque Nationale program Utopia: the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2001), “Last Exit to Utopia: Notes on the Byrdcliff Moment and The Road to Now” for the 100th anniversary of the Byrdcliff artists colony (2003), and “Brave New York: Between Utopia & Free City,” at Instituto Cervantes, NYC (2007).

His short fiction has been anthologized in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Ulrich Baer, ed. (NYU Press, 2002) and Sponde, Giovanni Maccari, ed. (Avagliano Editore, 2001), and has appeared in New England Review, Conjunctions, American Letters & Commentary, Chimurenga, Istanbul Literary Review and other journals.

He has contributed nonfiction work to publications including Metropolis, Culturefront, OpenDemocracy.net, Designer/Builder, Leonardo, and to the anthology After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, eds., (Routledge, 2002). His collection of essays on the politics and culture of the 1930s was published in the companion volume to Tim Robbins’s film Cradle Will Rock.

From 2000 to 2006, Darton was fiction editor of American Letters & Commentary. He has been a senior editor for the on-line journal Frigate, to which he contributed “Heartbeats on the Left: Radical Strategies for the Novel,” a series of essays on books by Tillie Olsen, John Sanford and Elio Vittorini. Darton served as an editor of Conjunctions from 1991 to 1994. Between 1981 and 1983, he edited the Art and Performance section of the cultural monthly East Village Eye chronicling that community’s emergence on the international arts scene.

In recent years, Darton has taught fiction and screenwriting on the faculty of the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing program, developed courses in media studies at Hunter College and Fordham University and taught fiction writing at NYU and the University of Pennsylvania Writer’s Conference. From 1998 to 2006, Darton led Writing at the Crossroads, an inter-genre workshop that has served as a laboratory for several published books and shorter writings. He was awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1991) and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (1998).

Darton has recently completed a cultural memoir Notes of a New York Son, 1995-2007 and Orogene, a novel. His essay “News From Nowheresville: Time Warner’s ‘Center of Everything’ Comes to New York” appears in The Suburbanization of New York, Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, eds., published by Princeton Architectural Press (2007).

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