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The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960
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 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 conversation 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!
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 conversation 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!
368 pages, Hardcover
Published May 17, 2022
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726 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
August 22, 2022
Great topic, one really crying out for a skilled historian. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, and instead it’s a nonstop cavalcade of names, some important to the story, some only loosely connected, all tied together with sweeping generalizations and contextual history that feels like it was cribbed out of Wikipedia, rather than based on actual research in primary and secondary sources. I acknowledge the author’s familial ties with some of the players in this story, but he should have turned over his source material to a historian who could have better wrangled all the players and weaved a stronger narrative; instead it’s just incessant name-dropping, to the point where the reader just tunes out because thy can’t keep anyone straight or even gets a full portrait of who these people are, beyond being just names who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and are then heard from no more.
August 12, 2022
In the winter of 1972 - 1973 I worked on Cape Cod helping a retired Woburn firefighter do renovations to properties on homes on the Outer Cape. One of those properties was the Hans Hofmann House in Provincetown. Our employer (who had just purchased the house) explained to us that Hofmann had been an important American artist. The house, located on the West End of Provincetown just where Commercial Street bends at the Coast Guard station. The house was palatial and featured a huge room with a wall of windows and a balcony that overlooked the huge, space. The balcony was made from wood salvaged from the bow of a ship. At the far end of the room there was a fireplace that took six foot logs. It was a room for the drinking of Meade. It was a room Beowulf would feel comfortable in. It was in fact, a room where students Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Frank Kline and Willem de Kooning brought their work to be critiqued by (the sometimes naked) Hofmann during his infamous Friday afternoon sessions. It was the room where one could argue, abstract expressionism was born.
I’ve always loved the Outer Cape. Besides the natural beauty of that part of Cape Cod, I was always aware of the town of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet as influential artist communities. The plays of Eugene O’Neill, the distilled loneliness of Edward Hopper’s paintings and the unadorned simplicity of Bauhaus boxes set among the dunes serve as reminders of how influential those communities are to American art.
The Shores of Bohemia by John Taylor Williams tell the story of the Outer Cape which is also the story of Greenwich Village. It covers the years 1910 to 1960 and celebrates the political (left of left), literary, and artistic explosions that shaped the 20th Century. Anyone interested in the movers and shapers of our times would find this book fascinating. Historical figures like John Reed and Louise Bryant (think Reds), Walter Gropius, Nathanial Saltonstall, Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara and Emma Goldman breeze through these pages like mists on a summer night.
If there is a problem with this book it’s keeping track of the players. The bohemians that populated Greenwich Village and the Outer Cape were a frisky bunch. The couplings and the uncouplings, the enormous square dance that was their sexual dalliances is almost impossible for an old fart like me to keep track of. That is weak complaining but there were long passages that I found almost impossible to follow due to the adulterous games of whack-a-mole these folks engaged in. I’m looking at you, Jack Hall, I’m looking at you Mary McCarthy.
So I’m giving it 3.5 stars cause it’s up my alley.
I’ve always loved the Outer Cape. Besides the natural beauty of that part of Cape Cod, I was always aware of the town of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet as influential artist communities. The plays of Eugene O’Neill, the distilled loneliness of Edward Hopper’s paintings and the unadorned simplicity of Bauhaus boxes set among the dunes serve as reminders of how influential those communities are to American art.
The Shores of Bohemia by John Taylor Williams tell the story of the Outer Cape which is also the story of Greenwich Village. It covers the years 1910 to 1960 and celebrates the political (left of left), literary, and artistic explosions that shaped the 20th Century. Anyone interested in the movers and shapers of our times would find this book fascinating. Historical figures like John Reed and Louise Bryant (think Reds), Walter Gropius, Nathanial Saltonstall, Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara and Emma Goldman breeze through these pages like mists on a summer night.
If there is a problem with this book it’s keeping track of the players. The bohemians that populated Greenwich Village and the Outer Cape were a frisky bunch. The couplings and the uncouplings, the enormous square dance that was their sexual dalliances is almost impossible for an old fart like me to keep track of. That is weak complaining but there were long passages that I found almost impossible to follow due to the adulterous games of whack-a-mole these folks engaged in. I’m looking at you, Jack Hall, I’m looking at you Mary McCarthy.
So I’m giving it 3.5 stars cause it’s up my alley.
July 5, 2022
More like notes for a book than a book
November 13, 2022
Very interesting history but not well written just lots of facts and names and places ,events piled up on each other. the cape is a magic place wish i had been there circa 1960 but i was a little girl then-
July 21, 2022
Yes, so a lot of artists fucked each other and drank a lot. Didn't we already know that? What I did like - and could have used more of - was the history of the settlement of Cape Cod and how the economics and movement of population allowed the middle class (and upper class) artists to move into this area which had once been quite remote. This could all have been conveyed in an article or a chapter or two.
August 11, 2022
Wasn’t sure I’d finish this. The first couple of chapters were disjointed, chronologically confusing, and mostly lists of names-writers, painters, activists.
Things improved some as I moved through the book.
Things improved some as I moved through the book.
February 11, 2025
This book was exhausting. Also another author who knows about Cape architectural history told me that it is “riddled with factual errors.” Which appears true in some parts of the book. One of the biggest problems with it is that- besides the gratuitous name dropping- is the fact that the author spends an inordinate amount of space providing world history and/or NYC history, and then I think neglecting more localized information about the towns profiled in the book (Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet). He also goes on many tangents about people who were not central to the core bohemian group he discussed. It’s good to provide some history or context about what was happening in the world, but this was overkill. And not every single person who attended a Wellfleet beach party needs to be mentioned. That said he did have a unique perspective about the bohemian crowd, since he married into one of the prominent families.
September 7, 2025
The first half was fascinating-- so many interesting characters in the place I love. But the second half lost the focus. There was a chapter I swear was just a list of all the children and what happened to them.
The other annoying thing was each chapter is standalone. So he might go to someone's death in one chapter, and then in the next, she's alive again and he's introducing her as a new person (oddly, he did this the most with women). It was quite jarring.
I would love to see this as a documentary. So many interesting lives!
ATY Prompt: A book with a coastal setting
The other annoying thing was each chapter is standalone. So he might go to someone's death in one chapter, and then in the next, she's alive again and he's introducing her as a new person (oddly, he did this the most with women). It was quite jarring.
I would love to see this as a documentary. So many interesting lives!
ATY Prompt: A book with a coastal setting
August 31, 2024
Boy, do I not agree with The New Yorker, the New York Times, or any number of other reviews. The first couple of chapters of this book drew a trenchant analysis of how Provincetown became a summer satellite of Greenwich Village in the 1890s through the 1920s, but then it devolved into laundry lists of people known by the author’s father-in-law and his several wives. None of them was half as interesting or monumental as the people mentioned in passing, so why must they each get at least a chapter devoted to their upbringing, road to Cape Cod, and poor parenting decisions? There was a swell book to be written but this is not it.
September 22, 2022
The culture, history, family lore,
they built, bred, drank, and fought to the fore;
Nation grew, Art thrived with high tide of War;
Many long for, others still deplore;
Waves crash, tides out, they had been let ashore.
they built, bred, drank, and fought to the fore;
Nation grew, Art thrived with high tide of War;
Many long for, others still deplore;
Waves crash, tides out, they had been let ashore.
April 18, 2023
The Outer Cape and Greenwich Village of the first half of the twentieth century--it's hard to imagine a richer time and place in American cultural history. Unfortunately, the significance of this history is buried here under an avalanche of names, both of central figures and the merely peripheral. Also baffling, the author seemed intent upon identifying who lived in what Cape house. It all makes for a density that left me feeling more like I was wading than reading.
July 5, 2022
I like the basic concept of this book — basically an overview of how the Outer Cape, especially the Provincetown/Truro area, became where America’s Modernists summered — but honestly, huge chunks of this book are basically lists of who lived in which house and who was fucking whom in said houses. And neither of those things particularly interest me.
August 23, 2022
The Outer Cape (Provincetown, Truro, & Wellfleet) were and are fascinating places. This account of the Bohemians who shuttled back and forth between Greenwich Village and The Cape is filled with great anecdotes, but way too many lists of names and minute details.
September 5, 2022
Greenwich Village may be a synonym for the 20th-century bohemian tradition in the United States, but literary agent and writer John Taylor Williams makes a strong case that the Outer Cape of Cape Cod, from Wellfleet to Provincetown, constituted another longstanding epicenter of American counterculture. Of course, the two overlapped considerably, and the denizens of the early Village pioneered the rental of cheap Cape Cod houses built largely by earlier generations of Portuguese fishermen.
The number of notable individuals who summered, lived, or passed through the Outer Cape from 1910 to roughly 1960 is enormous. One of the problems with the book is that Williams, who knew many of them or their progeny personally, feels compelled to name them all. The result is a dizzying array of individuals whose tangled family, political, sexual, marital, artistic, and intellectual connections can end up in summary paragraphs that they are almost comic.
Williams does lose control of his material when he strays too far outside the confines of New York and Cape Cod to try to summarize some of the political and cultural currents that shaped the lives of his Cape Cod bohemians — from World War I and prohibition to the New Deal and the Cold War. Context is important, but his wide-view snapshots are sometimes awkward or misleading.
Still, Williams has a fascinating story to tell, as the Cape drew such disparate figures as political activist John Reed, dramatist Eugene O’Neill, writer Mary McCarthy, critic Edmund Wilson, painter Edward Hopper, architect Walter Gropius, academic Arthur Schlesinger, and novelist Norman Mailer.
Almost all were political progressives who, in the early years at least, supported Marxism in general, or the Communist Party in particular. They also dedicated themselves to new visions of art, whether painting or prose, from abstract expressionism to the new journalism. Exiles from Germany’s Bauhaus movement, relocated to the Cape, helped revolutionize American and international architecture. From its earliest years, the Cape also became a refuge for gays, closeted or not.
These roaring political and artistic debates often took a back seat, however, to their principal preoccupation on the Cape: drinking and sex. To complicate matters, they often insisted on marrying each other, leaving a remarkable toll of alcoholism, broken relationships, neglected children, and financial disarray in their wake. Two of Williams’s more frequent phrases: “heavy drinker” and “final wife.”
Alcohol destroyed the promise of many Cape Cod bohemians, in Williams’s view, although a few were able to withstand a decades-long drinking regime. Take Edmund Wilson, who, after writing all morning, would imbibe “a bottle of whiskey through the evening, in addition to a bottle of wine with dinner, and would sustain the same routine seven days per week” — through roughly fifty years.
Williams also focuses on less familiar names who built homes on the Cape and anchored its special mix of artistic independence, feminism, political radicalism, innovative building, nude bathing, and hard partying. For example, he devotes a number of pages to his father-in-law, builder and architect Jack Hall and his tumultuous marriages. Hall’s work in developing Bound Brook Island culminated in the design of a celebrated example of Cape Cod modern architecture, Hatch House.
The dunes and beaches of Cape Cod abide, but also the achievements, and the mythology, of a remarkable generation of artists, writers, and builders who congregated in a special place under cultural and historical circumstances that will never replicated again.
But, oh, those parties!
The number of notable individuals who summered, lived, or passed through the Outer Cape from 1910 to roughly 1960 is enormous. One of the problems with the book is that Williams, who knew many of them or their progeny personally, feels compelled to name them all. The result is a dizzying array of individuals whose tangled family, political, sexual, marital, artistic, and intellectual connections can end up in summary paragraphs that they are almost comic.
Williams does lose control of his material when he strays too far outside the confines of New York and Cape Cod to try to summarize some of the political and cultural currents that shaped the lives of his Cape Cod bohemians — from World War I and prohibition to the New Deal and the Cold War. Context is important, but his wide-view snapshots are sometimes awkward or misleading.
Still, Williams has a fascinating story to tell, as the Cape drew such disparate figures as political activist John Reed, dramatist Eugene O’Neill, writer Mary McCarthy, critic Edmund Wilson, painter Edward Hopper, architect Walter Gropius, academic Arthur Schlesinger, and novelist Norman Mailer.
Almost all were political progressives who, in the early years at least, supported Marxism in general, or the Communist Party in particular. They also dedicated themselves to new visions of art, whether painting or prose, from abstract expressionism to the new journalism. Exiles from Germany’s Bauhaus movement, relocated to the Cape, helped revolutionize American and international architecture. From its earliest years, the Cape also became a refuge for gays, closeted or not.
These roaring political and artistic debates often took a back seat, however, to their principal preoccupation on the Cape: drinking and sex. To complicate matters, they often insisted on marrying each other, leaving a remarkable toll of alcoholism, broken relationships, neglected children, and financial disarray in their wake. Two of Williams’s more frequent phrases: “heavy drinker” and “final wife.”
Alcohol destroyed the promise of many Cape Cod bohemians, in Williams’s view, although a few were able to withstand a decades-long drinking regime. Take Edmund Wilson, who, after writing all morning, would imbibe “a bottle of whiskey through the evening, in addition to a bottle of wine with dinner, and would sustain the same routine seven days per week” — through roughly fifty years.
Williams also focuses on less familiar names who built homes on the Cape and anchored its special mix of artistic independence, feminism, political radicalism, innovative building, nude bathing, and hard partying. For example, he devotes a number of pages to his father-in-law, builder and architect Jack Hall and his tumultuous marriages. Hall’s work in developing Bound Brook Island culminated in the design of a celebrated example of Cape Cod modern architecture, Hatch House.
The dunes and beaches of Cape Cod abide, but also the achievements, and the mythology, of a remarkable generation of artists, writers, and builders who congregated in a special place under cultural and historical circumstances that will never replicated again.
But, oh, those parties!
August 11, 2022
Four stars for fascinating and exhaustive information. Three stars overall b/c it’s exhausting to read! Names and relationships pile up on pages until one’s head swims.
October 6, 2023
Important, ambitious and sometimes enlightening work. I admire Williams’ encyclopedic and anecdotal knowledge of such a fascinating community, particularly given said community’s outsized impact on America’s cultural fabric. However, the account is rife with a dizzying barrage of name drops, asides and nonlinear storytelling that makes it a very tough read.
October 5, 2022
Gossipy. So if that appeals try the book. I was interested in the history but for a book without footnotes or a bibliography it was hard to know what was true and what was just stories passed down.
Some of the writing was pretty awful. Cliches anyone?
Some of the writing was pretty awful. Cliches anyone?
September 18, 2023
Still wanting to read on, because all of these people my father would know if he were still here. Ever since watching the film "Reds" and saw Heaton Vorse talking about his mother and the people he met, I had the best convos with my Dad about all the people in it. Heaton played the Ukelele on film. It was an exceptional film.. more so because of the great interviews done of the people mentioned in this story. Warren Beatty gave us a lot more than a movie. If only my father were still here, because he knew of all these Bohemians. I read this because of him because he would know. And we would be talking about it. That's what I miss.
Yes... Lots of confusion here as dozens of names spurted out all at once. That was confusing, so I stopped trying to remember who everybody was. Writing could be better as the story flies all over the place, often leaving us wondering what happened to everyone in the end.
I have spent many years in Truro and Provincetown, and I'm trying hard to figure out where all these homes were. I do know where Mary Heaton Vorse's house was.. It was dilapadated for years, with her son Heaton still living there and renting it out to modern day hippies and lost souls.
But, as I try to finish this book, and it's somewhat sloppy writing, I ask why did you drop a bomb about Tiny Worthington and Paul Robeson supposedly having a child together and then drop the ball? What? When and Where?? The book does drop a lot of bombs without explanation. So.. until I finish, I'll hold back what I really think.
Yes... Lots of confusion here as dozens of names spurted out all at once. That was confusing, so I stopped trying to remember who everybody was. Writing could be better as the story flies all over the place, often leaving us wondering what happened to everyone in the end.
I have spent many years in Truro and Provincetown, and I'm trying hard to figure out where all these homes were. I do know where Mary Heaton Vorse's house was.. It was dilapadated for years, with her son Heaton still living there and renting it out to modern day hippies and lost souls.
But, as I try to finish this book, and it's somewhat sloppy writing, I ask why did you drop a bomb about Tiny Worthington and Paul Robeson supposedly having a child together and then drop the ball? What? When and Where?? The book does drop a lot of bombs without explanation. So.. until I finish, I'll hold back what I really think.
June 28, 2023
A slice of history of an artist's colony on Cape Cod from 1910-1960. A dizzying array of names of authors, painters, artists, sculptors, editors, playwrights, poets, and other bohemian types that lived in their own world on Cape Cod in many old houses and fishing shacks that didn't have electricity and running water in many cases. Just about everyone had affairs and multiple marriages with everyone else it seemed, and children from resulting unions sort of raised themselves and often had a rough time of it. Still it was interesting bit of history, and I enjoyed hearing about people I had heard of like Margaret Sanger, Mary McCarthy, Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passos, Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock. There were a great many more I had not heard of, but I am no art history or literature expert. A great many were into communism, and this caused some divides and hurt feelings between different factions. But many artists produced some of their greatest works during this period and place.
December 29, 2022
“The Shores of Bohemia” is a short, punchy take on the early- to mid-20th Century radical writers, painters, architects, and public intellectuals who, fleeing the overwhelming capitalism of America, found refuge on the outer spit of land of Cape Cod, namely in Provincetown, Truro, and WellFleet. The book is a high-level introduction to the tangled lives of the Cape Cod Bohemian crowd, and can sometimes read more like a game of “six degrees” than a tightly-flowing narrative. In these pages, we meet the brilliant but personally-troubled Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, the architects of the Bauhaus architecture school of through, public intellectuals like Norman Mailer and Arthur Schlesinger, and lesser-known bohemians like Jack Hall, Jack Phillips, and Edmund Wilson.
Along the shores of Cape Cod, these unique personalities discovered the space and freedom to pursue the radical ideas shunned in the establishment cities and American suburbs of the mainland.
Along the shores of Cape Cod, these unique personalities discovered the space and freedom to pursue the radical ideas shunned in the establishment cities and American suburbs of the mainland.
March 4, 2023
A foray into the writers, sculptors, painters, architects, actors, and others that brought a bohemia to Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet. Summers on the Outer Cape and winters in Greenwich Village. Hedonistic lifestyle in many ways but also a gathering place of those willing to push societal boundaries, push paintings beyond realism, explore modern architecture, start magazines, create theatres, and numerous other "firsts." Reads like a Who’s Who. I had to read this book in increments. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the treasure trove of information. Good read, particularly if you haunt the Cape. I laughed at the idea of spending a half-day on dirt roads to get from P-town to Hyannis. I still hate the trip to Hyannis and it only takes me 40 minutes.
September 18, 2022
Since being a Greenwich Village iconoclast paid poorly, the rebels who gathered there in the early twentieth century needed an economical place to spend the summer. Enter Cape Cod. A vast cast of artists, writers, and revolutionaries gravitated towards that scenic peninsula over the decades. There they painted, politicked, and penned plays, poems, and polemics, but also went skinny dipping, drank superhuman amounts of alcohol, and swapped lovers constantly. Williams really only stops to humanize his father-in-law and his three wives. Otherwise it's just an exhaustive and exhausting list of famous people.
November 12, 2022
As a frequent visitor to the outer cape and fascinated with the history of the arts in that area and the impact on America I looked forward to reading this book. It turned out to be a slog. So much name dropping! Some sentences (paragraphs) were just names. A large part of the book was spent on communism, stalin, etc. etc. But I plowed through. Every once in a great while you would be rewarded with some description or context that was stunning. Marlon Brando riding his motorcycle to P-Town to read for Street and enlisted to fix a toilet! Softball games with authors and painters. But those were few and far between.
July 24, 2024
This was very interesting, but Jesus! He really ought to have had a page dedicated to, or a family tree diagram to keep track of everyone. He'd mention a name, then go off on a tangent about their father or who they were sleeping with and by the time he finished all of that.....you'd forget who he was talking about in the first place.
I lived year round in Provincetown from 74 to 76. I think the only person I ever ran into was Norman Mailer. It was kind of fascinating how many card carrying communists there were! And doling out all that land....you can't get a place in P Town anymore for under a million!
I lived year round in Provincetown from 74 to 76. I think the only person I ever ran into was Norman Mailer. It was kind of fascinating how many card carrying communists there were! And doling out all that land....you can't get a place in P Town anymore for under a million!
August 28, 2025
Williams is a meticulous researcher, but he had no idea how to write this book, i.e. he needed to focus on a smaller group, a single dwelling or an individual--instead he gives us the kitchen sink, and it is very tough to read. It's also incredibly surprising that a literary agent didn't know enough to get himself a great editor...who might not have solved the problem of a lack of focus, but at least would have caught dumb mistakes, such as the misuse of the term "suffragette" (the British activists) for "suffragist" (American activists for the vote for women). While I loved the subject of this book, which is close to my heart, it was a true slog to get through this work, alas.
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July 15, 2022"Altogether, the milieu on the Cape—the famous and their forgotten companions alike—built a world of perpetual creative ferment, a hub from which great trends in art, philosophy, and politics spread to the rest of the country. Williams gives an expansive and alluring account of the Cape’s heyday. You’ll wish you could have been there." — Talya Zax
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
October 29, 2022
A non-fiction account of the 1920's "hippies" who experienced all sorts of drinking and sexual freedoms until the northern portion of Cape Cod was declared a National Park. "The Shores of Bohemia” is structured as a kind of lament for the golden days before the Cape was overrun by RVs and clam shacks. (NY Times). The accounting of the plethora characters who lived there reads like a list, and the reader would have enjoyed more in-depth stories of each of them. ANyone familiar with the villages of Cape Cod will enjoy thinking about the earlier days.
October 31, 2022
I enjoyed reading this book because it's a subject I have been interested in for a long time, and it offered some new information. I really liked many of the personal details about the various "players" that Williams was able to unearth as well. It's not a book you can read all at once. There is a great deal of name-dropping, frequently with many dropped in at once, but it's also fun to pick up every so often and read a new chapter, then digest that for a while before the next. I was glad to have done so.
March 23, 2023
I am a resident of the Outer Cape and enjoyed learning more about the beginnings of the Artist Colony, the German Bauhaus emigres, the Theatre Scene, and the literati who chose to live/summer here. However, I felt that that the tone of the book depended heavily on the "salacious," and the dropping of names. The book often lacked coherence even though the chapter titles gave some direction. I also appreciated that Williams assessed the effects of the Bohemian lifestyle on the subsequent generation.
April 14, 2023
Reading this book is like being brought to a large cocktail party, not knowing anyone, but being introduced to everyone. The author had a tough job trying to tell the stories of dozens of people, how they related to each other and how they affected American and even world history.Included here are Edmund Wilson, Eugene O'Neill and, as mentioned above, many others.
On the whole an admirable job. I think if I had not spent some days on the Cape and in particular Wellfleet and Provincetown the story would not have meant as much to me. I wonder if there could be such a place today.
On the whole an admirable job. I think if I had not spent some days on the Cape and in particular Wellfleet and Provincetown the story would not have meant as much to me. I wonder if there could be such a place today.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews