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An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century
Their names are iconic: Eugene O'Neill, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius-the list goes on and on. Scorning the devastation that industrialization had wrought on the nation's workforce and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, they gathered in the streets of Greenwich Village and on the beachfronts of Cape Cod. They began as progressives but soon turned to socialism, then communism. They founded theaters, periodicals, and art schools. They formed editorial boards that met in beach shacks and performed radical new plays in a shanty on the docks, where they could see the ocean through cracks in the floor. They welcomed the tremendous wave of talent fleeing Europe in the 1930s. At the end of their era, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism when the anticapitalist movement fragmented into other causes.
John Taylor "Ike" Williams, who married into the Cape's artistic world and has spent half a century talking about and walking along its shores with these cultural and political luminaries, renders the twisting lives and careers of a generation of staggering American thinkers and creators.
The Shores of Bohemia records a great set of shifts in American culture and the ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year conversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries. Together they found a community as they created some of the great works of the American Century. This is their story. Welcome to the party!
List of contents
Map: The Outer Cape Preface Part I: Spring
1. Arcadia
2. Greenwich Village and Provincetown
3. The 1913 Armory Show
4. The Provincetown Players
5.
The Masses 6. The War to End All Wars
7. Reds!
8. The Jazz Age
Part III: Summer
9. Bound Brook Island
10. The Popular Front
11. Dodie
12. Country Life
13. World War II
Part III: Fall
14. Tiger Cat
15. The Abstractors
16. The Crimes of Stalin
17. The Lost Generation's Children
18. Provincetown Either Way
Part IV: Winter
19. Mardi
20. The New, New Bauhaus
21. Joan's Beach
22. New York Jew
23. Eden's End
Author's Note Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
About the author
John Taylor Williams
Summary
An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century.
