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!

A cultural history of the Czech people, examining the significance of the small central European nation's artistic, literary, and political developments from its origins through approximately 1960.

Featuring thirteen satirical short stories, a unique collection includes scientific superstars, a rock singer who is the voice of the people, and two lost souls who drive off the edge of the world and find each other. From the Paperback edition.

In the early years of the 20th century, a band of talented individualists living in Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and political art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism. Stansell offers a comprehensive history of this period that flourished briefly until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression. Illustrations.

How did a sleepy New England fishing village become a gay mecca? In this dynamic history, the author explains why Provincetown, Massachusetts, --alternately known as "Land's End," "Cape-tip," "Cape-end," and, to some, "Queersville, U.S.A."--has meant many things to many people. 36 photos.

DIVDIVA classic novel of a young man in love with women, the world, and love itself/divDIV The dunes of Jerry Engels’s childhood are those of Indiana Shores, a small slice of paradise resting between Gary and the industrial furnaces of Chicago. Jerry loves Lake Michigan and swimming its waters; he loves the beach and the live dune where he plays. But mostly, Jerry loves women./divDIV /divDIVThis isn’t the awkward lust of an adolescent; Jerry is a boy who loves women and everything about them: a flower tucked into the hair, or the length of a leg. Teenage Jerry is a charmer, a flirt, “an erotic pantheist or a pantheistic eroticist.” Always, in his honesty and quirkiness, he is an irresistible and lovable character, himself. When he falls for Rosalind, his love takes on new, humorous, and wondrous dimensions./divDIV /divDIVAt the Shores celebrates love in all of its forms; it is a coming-of-age novel for all generations./div/div

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline—a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life—the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps—that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.