The Shores of Bohemia
A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960
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2.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 beach - fronts 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!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literary agent Williams (coauthor, Perle, Williams & Fischer on Publishing Law) delivers an admiring group portrait of the writers, artists, architects, and playwrights who flocked to Cape Cod in the first half of the 20th century. Over a 50-year period, notable figures including Edward Hopper, Mary McCarthy, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edmund Wilson divided their time between New York City's Greenwich Village and the Cape Cod communities of Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet, where they rented cheap rooms or bought old farmhouses and transformed them into artists' studios. Frequent parties and long days by the seaside provided ample opportunities to debate the virtues of realism, the merits of Stalinism versus Trotskyism, and other matters. Williams details the circumstances behind the plays, novels, and paintings created in Cape Cod, including Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life, and highlights how residents balanced their hedonistic lifestyles with serious dedication to progressive ideals. A poignant chapter profiling the children of this milieu reveals the harsher side of gifted but often neglectful parents who lived primarily for art and alcohol. Erudite and evocative, this is an indelible snapshot of a time and place that inspired significant creative achievement. Photos.
