The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village - Hardcover

Strausbaugh, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062078194 ISBN 13: 9780062078193

Publisher: Ecco, 2013

Synopsis

The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions for more than four hundred years, from half-free African slaves to working-class immigrants, artistic bohemians to politicians. Illustrated with thirty-two pages of black-and-white photos, "The Village" is John Strausbaugh's engaging narrative history of this unique New York neighborhood's life - a tapestry that unrolls across four centuries, from its origins as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its current status as an affluent bedroom community and tourist magnet. Strausbaugh traces the way in which Greenwich Village has been a culture engine, a magnet of tolerance, freedom, creativity, and activism. It has long attracted nonconformists-artists, radicals, visionaries, misfits, and life-adventurers-who have collided, collaborated, fused and feuded, developing ideas and creating art, drama, poetry, literature, filmmaking, and folk music that transformed the world. Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Marcel Duchamp, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, E. E. Cummings, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, Anais Nin, Eugene O'Neill, Fiorello La Guardia, Gene Tunney, mobster Vincent Chin Gigante, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, Charlie Parker, Woody Guthrie, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Grace Paley, and Edmund White are among the many remarkable individuals who made the Village the pinnacle of culture, politics, and social movements in America and around the world. From Dutch farmers and Washington Square patricians to slaves and bohemians, Prohibition-era speakeasies to Stonewall, Abstract Expressionism to AIDS, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire to today's upscale condos and four-star restaurants, the connecting narratives of "The Village" tell a fresh story of America itself.

About this title

Review:

"The very best kind of cultural history: Literate, lucid, erudite, and entertaining." --Michael Lesy, author of "Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties"

From the Back Cover:

A lively anecdotal history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood, from the 1600s to the present

The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions—from "half-free" Africans to working-class immigrants, from artists to politicians—for almost four hundred years. In his magisterial new book, cultural commentator John Strausbaugh weaves an absorbing narrative history of the Village, a tapestry that unrolls from its origins as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from its seat as the epicenter of the gay rights movement to its current status as an affluent bedroom community and tourist magnet.

Strausbaugh—"a particularly gifted chronicler of New Yorkiana" (Atlantic Monthly)—traces the Village's role as a culture engine, a bastion of tolerance, freedom, creativity, and activism that has spurred cultural change on a national, and sometimes even international, scale. He brings to life the long line of famous nonconformists who have collided there, collaborating, fusing and feuding, developing the ideas and creating the art that forever altered societal norms. In these pages, geniuses are made and destroyed, careers are launched, and revolutions are born. Poe, Whitman, Cather, Baldwin, Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, O'Neill, Pollock, La Guardia, Koch, Hendrix, and Dylan all come together across the ages, at a cultural crossroads the likes of which we may never see again.

From Dutch farmers and Washington Square patricians to slaves and bohemians, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to Stonewall, from Abstract Expressionism to AIDS, and from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to today's upscale condos and four-star restaurants, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the fresh and unforgettable story of America itself.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0062078194
• ISBN 13: 9780062078193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640