The village : 400 years of Beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues : a history of Greenwich Village
Title:
The village : 400 years of Beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues : a history of Greenwich Village
Author:
ISBN:
9780062078193
Edition:
First edition.
Physical Description:
xiv, 624 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits, facsimiles ; 24 cm
Contents:
From the Beginning Through the "Golden Age." : Bossen Bouwerie ; A magnet for misfits ; The first bohemians ; The restless Nineties ; The bohemians' neighbors ; The "Golden Age" begins ; 1913 ; The Provincetown Players ; The Golden Age wanes ; The next wave. -- The Dry Decade, the Red Decade, World War II: The Prohibition years ; The Coney Island of the soul ; The Red decade ; The wrong place for the right people ; Swag was our welfare. -- The Greenwich Village Renaissance: A refuge in the age of anxiety ; The "New York School" ; Duchamp, Cage, and the theory of Pharblongence ; Bebop ; The Beat Generation ; Pull my daisy ; Village voices ; Standing up to Moses and the Machine ; Off-off-Broadway ; The folk music scene ; From folk to rock ; Lenny Bruce and Valerie Solanas ; The radical '60s ; The Lion's Head. -- The Last Hurrah: Prelude to the Stonewall Uprising ; Stonewall ; Village celebrities of the 1970s ; After Stonewall ; Art in the junkyard ; The 1980s and AIDS.
Summary:
This is an anecdotal history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood, from the 1600s to the present. The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions, from "half-free" Africans to working-class immigrants, from artists to politicians, for almost four hundred years. In this book, the author weaves a narrative history of the Village, a tapestry that unrolls from its origins as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from its seat as the epicenter of the gay rights movement to its current status as an affluent bedroom community and tourist magnet. He traces the Village's role as a culture engine, a bastion of tolerance, freedom, creativity, and activism that has spurred cultural change on a national, and sometimes even international, scale. He brings to life the long line of famous nonconformists who have collided there, collaborating, fusing and feuding, developing the ideas and creating the art that forever altered societal norms. In these pages, geniuses are made and destroyed, careers are launched, and revolutions are born. Poe, Whitman, Cather, Baldwin, Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, O'Neill, Pollock, La Guardia, Koch, Hendrix, and Dylan all come together across the ages, at a cultural crossroads the likes of which we may never see again. From Dutch farmers and Washington Square patricians to slaves and bohemians, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to Stonewall, from Abstract Expressionism to AIDS, and from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to today's upscale condos and four-star restaurants, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the fresh and unforgettable story of America itself.
