American Moderns

Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

Christine Stansell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691142838
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400833665
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the early twentieth century, an exuberant brand of gifted men and women moved to New York City, not to get rich but to participate in a cultural revolution. For them, the city's immigrant neighborhoods--home to art, poetry, cafes, and cabarets in the European tradition--provided a place where the fancies and forms of a new America could be tested. Some called themselves Bohemians, some members of the avant-garde, but all took pleasure in the exotic, new, and forbidden.

In American Moderns, Christine Stansell tells the story of the most famous of these neighborhoods, Greenwich Village, which--thanks to cultural icons such as Eugene O'Neill, Isadora Duncan, and Emma Goldman--became a symbol of social and intellectual freedom. Stansell eloquently explains how the mixing of old and new worlds, politics and art, and radicalism and commerce so characteristic of New York shaped the modern American urban scene. American Moderns is both an examination and a celebration of a way of life that's been nearly forgotten.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

A Club, 65–66, 80

Adams, Henry, 14, 15

Addams, Jane, 15, 52, 60, 244, 249

African Americans (blacks), 14, 23, 25–26, 31, 43, 47, 67–68, 89, 126, 131, 337

and Dodge salon, 104–5, 109

intellectuals, 68, 119

and sexual license, 296

women, 228, 289

Aldington, Richard, 164, 201

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 327

American Hunger (Wright), 51

American (magazine), 181, 186

American Scene (James), 51

anarchism, 13, 22, 58, 62, 114, 149, 236

and Anderson, 199, 200, 202–4, 205, 208

and attentat, 37–38, 116

and avant-garde artists, 99, 139–40, 141

and Ferrer center, 96, 97, 114

and free love, 279–82

and free speech, 78

and free verse, 165

and Goldman, 35–38, 122–23, 136, 139–44

and McKinley assassination, 122

and merging of art and politics, 151

and New Women, 35–38

and sexual equality, 142, 227

vs. socialism, 140–41

and youth, 94

Anarchist Woman, An (Hapgood), 282, 283–85

Anderson, Frances, 218

Anderson, Margaret, 51, 53–54, 76, 89, 141, 151, 164, 175–77, 199, 215, 246–47, 317

and Goldman, 132–34, 137, 200, 202–6

and lesbianism, 251

as New Woman, 231

and paid work, 243–44, 246

and Pound, 207–8

and Ulysses trial and move to Europe, 32...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the 2009 Edition
• Prologue
• I. Bohemia
• II. Talking
• III. Writing
• IV. The Human Sex
• V. Former People
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index