Editing Will Irwin (section)

==''The City That Was''==
[[Image: Nysun04211906p5.jpg|right|thumb|First installment of Irwin's series "The City That Was" as it appeared in  ''[[The Sun (New York City)|The Sun]]'', in [[New York City]], Saturday, April 21, 1906, page 5]]
Irwin's biggest story and the feat that made his reputation as a journalist was his absentee coverage for  ''[[The Sun (New York City)|The Sun]]'', in [[New York City]], of the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|San Francisco earthquake]] of April 18, 1906.

Weigle and Clark described his activities:
: "Because he knew the city so well, he was assigned to write – mostly from memory, supplemented by scant telegraphic bulletins – the story of the quake. Before the last-edition deadline on the first day, April 18, 1906, he wrote fourteen columns of copy. and he kept writing, eight columns or more a day, for the next seven days, as fire swept the ruined city. The booklet, for which Irwin is most widely known, resulted from six or seven columns of the general description of pre-earthquake San Francisco that he wrote on the afternoon of the third day of the story."<ref>{{cite book |title=The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco |author=Will Irwin |date=1906 |publisher= B. W. Huebsch |location=New York |oclc=671922810 |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314 |access-date=February 5, 2023}}</ref>