Overview

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 economy and workforce 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, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism as the anti-capitalist 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 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!

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Reviews

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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A gossipy and utterly fascinating account...You're almost overwhelmed with famous names...[who] spent their times arguing, debating, and politicking...Somehow being outside the usual world helped these creative men and women reimagine it. -- New York Times Book Review An intimate view of creative lives in turbulent times. -- Kirkus Reviews Surely no place has had so many brilliant American painters, playwrights, novelists, architects, and intellectuals as the three towns at the end of Cape Cod did from 1910 to 1960. Ike Williams has found them all and given us an astonishing portrait of their lives together. -- Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author The spirit of that vanished era breathes again in Williams's meandering, affectionate tribute. -- Boston Globe Williams gives an expansive and alluring account of the Cape's heyday. You'll wish you could have been there. -- The Atlantic

Author Information

John Taylor Ike Williams is a founder of the literary agency Kneerim & Williams and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment litigation. He is the coauthor of the widely used textbook Perle, Williams & Fischer on Publishing Law. Williams has served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts awards panel and as a trustee of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among other positions. He lives in Cambridge and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

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