The Shores of Bohemia, John Taylor Williams
The Shores of Bohemia, John Taylor Williams
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

The Shores of Bohemia
A Cape Cod Story, 1910–1960

Author: John Taylor Williams

Narrator: Jeff Zinn

Unabridged: 11 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/17/2022


Synopsis

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 centuryTheir 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!

About John Taylor Williams

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Chris

Great topic, one really crying out for a skilled historian. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, and instead it’s a nonstop cavalcade of names, some important to the story, some only loosely connected, all tied together with sweeping generalizations and contextual history that feels like it was cribbed......more

Goodreads review by Paul

In the winter of 1972 - 1973 I worked on Cape Cod helping a retired Woburn firefighter do renovations to properties on homes on the Outer Cape. One of those properties was the Hans Hofmann House in Provincetown. Our employer (who had just purchased the house) explained to us that Hofmann had been an......more

Goodreads review by Lauren

Very interesting history but not well written just lots of facts and names and places ,events piled up on each other. the cape is a magic place wish i had been there circa 1960 but i was a little girl then-......more

Goodreads review by Debra

Wasn’t sure I’d finish this. The first couple of chapters were disjointed, chronologically confusing, and mostly lists of names-writers, painters, activists. Things improved some as I moved through the book.......more


Quotes

“A gossipy and utterly fascinating account…Somehow being outside the usual world helped these creative men and women reimagine it.” New York Times Book Review

“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

“An intimate view of creative lives in turbulent times.” Kirkus 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

“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


Awards

  • #1 Amazon bestseller
  • New Yorker Best Books of the Year
  • New York Times Book Review pick