The Shores of Bohemia
A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960
by John Taylor Williams
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.
Reviews
“[A] chronique scandaleuse of bad or baddish behavior on the Cape during the first half of the 20th century.” —Christopher Irmscher, The Wall Street Journal
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"The Shores of Bohemia, not only explores the unreliable boundaries between the local and the global, it marks, as well, the various intersections of historical event, human mysteries, and pure magic." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Snow Queen
"The spirit of that vanished era breathes again in Williams’s meandering, affectionate tribute." —Wendy Smith, The Boston Globe
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"This wonderful book utterly beguiled me. On the surface, it is about a small portion of Cape Cod, the three final towns: Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown. Yet it is about much more than that, and tells a beautiful story about friendship and creativity at the height of the American Century." —Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington
"The history of the outer Cape as a bohemian mecca dates back to 1898, when the Portland Gale devastated the Provincetown fishing industry and led to a glut of cheap housing that attracted artists and freethinkers interested in a summer respite..."
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