The Street I Know: The Autobiography of the Last of the Bohemians

The legend of Harold Sterns, the Last of the Bohemians, begins in 1912 when he runs naked through Harvard Yard, a twenty year-old man acting on impulse and looking like Shelley. At thirty-two he had left the United States, disgusted with the sordid red-baiting and prohibition snooping of the early twenties, disgusted also perhaps with himself, vowing never to return to a country so inhospitable to civilization.

Harold Stearns symbolized the bitter emptiness, the bewildered desperation of th...