Synopses & Reviews
A brilliant account of the legary American bohemians, hailed as "the best book ever written about this era, these people, and the ways they shook up our national culture for good" (Michael Kazin)
In the early years of the twentieth century, an exuberant band of talented individualists living in a shabby neighborhood called Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new.
Christine Stansell offers the first comprehensive history of this legary period. She takes us deep into the downtown bohemia, which brought together creative dissenters from all walks of life: hoboes and Harvard men, society matrons and immigrant Jews, Wobblies and New Women, poets and anarchists. And she depicts their lyrical hopes for the century they felt they were sponsoring -- a radiant vision of modernity, both egalitarian and artful, that flourished briefly, poignantly, until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression.
Review
"Christine Stansell has restored the pre-WWI avant-garde to the central place they deserve in the creation of twentieth-century American culture. A fascinating and important contribution." (Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom)
Review
"A fascinating and important contribution." --Eric Foner, author of
The Story of American Freedom"Sparkles with keen insights." --Patricia Cline Cohen, The New York Times Book Review
"Superb . . . A subtle and finely grained portrait." --Jackson Lears, The New Republic
Synopsis
Stansell offers a brilliant account of the American bohemians whose experiments in living, writing, and loving created the modern world and made New York its capital. 15 illustrations.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [339]-403) and index.
About the Author
Christine Stansell, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author of
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York City, 1789-1860. Her essays and reviews appear regularly in
The New Republic and
The London Review of Books. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Table of Contents
Bohemian beginnings in the 1890s -- Journeys to Bohemia -- Intellectuals, conversational politics, and free speech -- Emma Goldman and the modern public -- Art and life: modernity and literary sensibilities -- Writer friends: literary friendships and the romance of partisanship -- Sexual modernism -- Talking about sex -- Loving America with open eyes.