American Moderns : Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

by Christine Stansell

• ISBN13: 9780805067354
• ISBN10: 0805067353
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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

Prologue	1	(10)
I. BOHEMIA
Bohemian Beginnings in the 1890s	11	(29)
Journeys to Bohemia	40	(33)
II. TALKING
Intellectuals, Conversational Politics, and Free Speech	73	(47)
Emma Goldman and the Modern Public	120	(27)
III. WRITING
Art and Life: Modernity and Literary Sensibilities	147	(31)
Writer Friends: Literary Friendships and the Romance of Partisanship	178	(47)
IV. THE HUMAN SEX
Sexual Modernism	225	(48)
Talking about Sex	273	(38)
V. FORMER PEOPLE
Loving America with Open Eyes	311	(28)
Notes	339	(66)
Acknowledgments	405	(2)
Index	407

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