American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

by Christine Stansell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400833665
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Christine Stansell is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History at the University of Chicago. She is also the author of City of Women: Sex and Class in New York City, 1789-1860, and her essays and reviews appear regularly in the New Republic.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2009 Edition ix

Prologue 1

I Bohemia

1 Bohemian Beginnings in the 1890s 11

2 Journeys to Bohemia 40

II Talking

3 Intellectuals, Conversational Politics, and Free Speech 73

4 Emma Goldman and the Modern Public 120

III Writing

5 Art and Life: Modernity and Literary Sensibilities 147

6 Writer Friends: Literary Friendships and the Romance of Partisanship 178

IV The Human Sex

7 Sexual Modernism 225

8 Talking about Sex 273

V Former People

9 Loving America with Open Eyes 311

Notes 339

Acknowledgment 405

Index 407

What People are Saying About This

Eric Foner

Christine Stansell has restored the pre World War I avant-garde to the central place they deserve in the creation of twentieth century American culture. A fascinating and important contribution.
—(Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom)

Brian Morton

A brilliant and beautifully written portrait of a generation of free thinkers, reformers, artists, and dreamers. This is intellectual history at its finest.
—(Brian Morton, author of Starting out in the Evening)

Jean Strouse

In this original, searching look at turn of the century bohemian New York, Christine Stansell explores the formative moment in American Modernity—a time of vivid personalities, high ideals, and political, aesthetic, and sexual turmoil. A captivating story, wonderfully told.
—(Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier)

Katha Pollitt

A complex and exciting portrait of a crucial historical moment and the men and women who shaped it.
—(Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism)

Michael Kazin

American Moderns is a fiercely intelligent and vividly rendered masterwork. It is the best book ever written about this era, these people, and the way they shook up our national culture for good.
—(Michael Kazin, author America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960's)

Mike Wallace

A beautifully written evocation of bohemian Greenwich Village teeming with New Women and radical men dedicated to free speech, free love, free thought, and determined to emancipate American art, work, sex, and psyches from stifling Victorian constraints.
—(Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in History)

Editorial Reviews

They were novelists, artists' models, secretaries and chess whizzes; their ranks included Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Margaret Sanger and John Reed. A few were wealthy, many were poor, and they gathered in shabby saloons to argue about free love and Nietzsche as they plowed through mounds of spaghetti, brisket and bratwurst. In her latest book, Princeton historian Stansell (City of Women) examines the politics and cultural impact of the turn-of-the-20th-century American "bohemia." Combining newly imported European political awareness (Stansell says refugees from the 1905-1907 Russian Revolution arrived with "their saber wounds still festering") with institutionally guaranteed free speech, these New York radicals were much more open to the inclusion of Jews and women than their Old World counterparts. And even though they generally ignored black aspirations, Stansell argues that the bohemians created "the first full-bodied alternative to an established cultural elite," which undermined "the smug faith that culture was the domain of the well-born and tasteful" and dug "channels between high and low culture, outsiders and insiders." By so doing--despite their racial blinders--they made possible the cultural course of much of the 20th century: pioneering feminist ideas, helping to make New York the cultural capital of the nation and laying the groundwork for the African-American crossover that took place during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. If Stansell's grasshopperish prose occasionally jumps from one topic to another, it's only because her thorough and engaging study abounds with the superabundant energy it describes. B&w photos. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A Princeton historian on how Greenwich Village became Greenwich Village. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In American Moderns, Christine Stansell beautifully and lucidly introduces us to the moral, political and artistic capaciousness of the New York bohemians...a lively, lyrical new book...
—The New York Observer

Linfield

What Villagers did, mostly, was talk; Stansell captures the tone and texture of their conversation—so exuberant that its traces can be felt to this day.

The New Yorker

Stansell's book is a triumph. It is fun to read. It entirely remaps familiar terrain because of her feminism and sincere appreciation of difference.
—The Nation

Eunice Lipton

Stansell's vibrant cultural history…has captured the audacity of those who made New York the capital of modernity.
—The Boston Globe

Robert Taylor

It sparkles with keen insights on nearly every page. It strives to ascend to the literary heights of its subjects and for the most part it succeeds...an artfully fashioned book, by turns elegant and breezy...'American Moderns is a pleasure to read
—The New York Times Book Review

Cohen

"[Stansell's] history of Greenwich Village between 1890 and 1920 never forgets that people who defy political convention and people who defy artistic convention gravitate toward each other whatever their differences."

Village Voice

"Stansell frames her book around three activities: talking, writing and loving. She compels readers to appreciate what was shockingly new in each activity—no small feat, since we now take (nearly) for granted the unfettered speech, print and sex that these early radicals found so daring."—-Patricia Cline Cohen, New York Times

"[American Moderns] is about the creation of a new life in early-twentieth-century New York. . . . Stansell's book is a triumph."—-Eunice Lipton, Nation

From the Publisher

Stansell's book will certainly appeal to all those wishing to know more about radical politics in America, and its relationship with art and domestic life.

American Studies Today - Richard Martin

[American Moderns] is about the creation of a new life in early-twentieth-century New York. . . . Stansell's book is a triumph.

Nation - Eunice Lipton

Stansell frames her book around three activities: talking, writing and loving. She compels readers to appreciate what was shockingly new in each activity—no small feat, since we now take (nearly) for granted the unfettered speech, print and sex that these early radicals found so daring.

New York Times - Patricia Cline Cohen

Stansell's book will certainly appeal to all those wishing to know more about radical politics in America, and its relationship with art and domestic life.
— Richard Martin

American Studies Today

[American Moderns] is about the creation of a new life in early-twentieth-century New York. . . . Stansell's book is a triumph.
— Eunice Lipton

Nation

Stansell frames her book around three activities: talking, writing and loving. She compels readers to appreciate what was shockingly new in each activity—no small feat, since we now take (nearly) for granted the unfettered speech, print and sex that these early radicals found so daring.
— Patricia Cline Cohen

New York Times