Their names are iconic: Eugene O'Neill, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Annie Albers, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius-and the list goes on and on. Scorning the devastation that industrialization had wrought on the nation's economy 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, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism as the anti-capitalist movement fragmented into other causes in the 1960's. John Taylor "Ike" Williams, who married into the Cape's artistic world and has spent fifty years talking and walking its shores with these cultural and political revolutionaries, gives us the twisting lives and careers of a staggering generation of American thinkers and creators. The Shores of Bohemia records a great set of shifts in American culture, of ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year coversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries, who found a community as they created some of the great works of the American century. This is their story. Welcome to the party!

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.

About the Author
John Taylor "Ike" Williams is a founder of the literary agency Kneerim & Williams and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and first amendment litigation. He is the coauthor of the widely used Perle, Williams & Fischer on Publishing Law. Williams has served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts awards panel and as a Trustee of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among other positions. He lives in Cambridge and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.


Book Information
ISBN 9780374262754
Author John Taylor Williams
Format Hardback
Page Count 368
Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Weight(grams) 582g
Dimensions(mm) 238mm * 161mm * 34mm