The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960

This is a great book if you want to learn more about the early arts scene on the lower Cape.

In this brilliantly depicted and long-overdue book about Cape Cod's 'Golden Era of Artistic Revolution,' Ike Williams has gifted us with a portrait of the intellectual anarchists who peopled Cape Cod between 1900 and 1960. Freed from Victorian strictures, rebellious new voices exploded from the arts - writing, painting, theatre - bringing Communism, Socialism, Women's Suffrage to the fore, and transforming America's complacent mindset forever.Budding giants like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Hopper, Mary McCarthy, E.E Cummings, Emma Goldman, Edmund Wilson, Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, and dozens more, relocated from Greenwich Village, and Stalin's Russia, to Cape Cod, and turned the fishing villages of Provincetown, Wellfleet and Truro, into exploding meccas of Modern Thought, a movement of revolutionary, utopian ideals.The cast of characters is huge, a dizzying plethora of avant-garde writers, thinkers, artists, who gathered their splendors on the Cape for more than half a century of drinking, half-starving, fighting, wife-swapping. Yet it was a time and place that shaped American art and spawned some of the greatest novels, theatre and painting of our time. O'Neill and Williams swore they wrote their best works there. The Shores of Bohemia is an important work 1) because it highlights a long-overlooked and important part of Cape Cod's history as a Bohemian Mecca for sixty years. And 2) because it allows us to once again bear witness to the birth and evolution of Modern Art, Literature, and Theatre, and how 'radical' Left Wing thought survived in spite of the Red Scare, World War II and the Cold War. The author is a part-time native of the Cape and knew many of the characters, thus, he writes with obvious affection for these 'flawed, rowdy, careless bohemians' who changed the world with their brilliance. I only wish I had lived then. I highly recommend this fascinating book. Bravo, Ike Williams!

I agree with the negative reviews that this book turned out to be a "who slept with whom" list that got very, very tedious, and in the final analysis, I was bored stiffer than Eugene O'Neill after a quart of bond whiskey. There are also very many repetitions in the endless lists and hell's bells...was every man named Jack and "handsome and square-jawed"? The author bit off more than he could chew with so many explanations of cultural movements from US Socialism to Stalinism to the rise of gay culture. On this last subject, gay and lesbian readers who want to know more about P-town as a gay tourist destination will get very little information. Williams is enamored (obviously since his marriage into Cape Cod society gave him access to "his people") of the WASPS, but does not even scratch the surface of gay life. It is misleading to see Amazon market this book with others of gay culture, so be forewarned. Someone else will have to write the book about gay Cape Cod. I have at least three errors of fact that are driving me nuts, again, due to the lack of a good editor or fact checker, and I am a midlevel American culture fan, not a sociology professor.

Have lived in the Wellfleet outer Cape area since 1942. So, the names, places, and individual stories are fun to learn about.

... and next summer .. and the summer after that. A memoir of sorts, based on interviews with the descendants of the original Greenwich Village bohemians that made Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet what they were, 1910 - 1960. After this, go back and read the biography of Margaret Sanger if you have not already done so. Great beach reading.

I read Hayden Herrera's wonderful memoir "Upper Bohemia" and then "Charmed Life" by Mary McCarthy. I had so looked forward to a deep dive into the intellectual and creative worlds of Wellfleet and Truro. I love that area of the Cape and have spent many years exploring the ponds, trails and woods in Wellfleet. Then there is the rich artistic/architectural tradition, another lifetime of exploration. . This book has absolutely none of the sense of what it is to spend time on the Outer Cape . It's just a list of names, who knew who, who ate dinner where, who slept with whose partner. I just can't imagine how someone could take such a vibrant, sensual, fascinating, unique story and make it boring but this author has managed to do it. I highly recommend Hayden Herrera's book as an antidote!

This is one of the laziest group biographies I've ever read. The descriptions are slapdash and repetitive; there is no sense, beyond politics, of what drew these people together. There's no cultural criticism--of the milieu, of the art, of the zeitgeist--and the individual portraits of the principals is disappointingly thin. I made it only a third of the way through the book before giving up. It was like reading a series of gossip columns about the intelligentsia in the first half of the 20th century.For a comparison of how a book like this might have acquired some heft and readability, check out Mary Gabriel's "Ninth Street Women," published a couple of years back. Now there's a page turner!What a disappointment!

I heard a piece on NPR about this book and was excited to read it. The subject matter is so interesting and such a vibrant piece of American history. However, this book is beyond dry. It reads like someone's Phd dissertation, overly detailed scholarly and not for the lay-person who wants a feel for what the era was like. Unless you are also doing research on this subject, it is not in my opinion a book for the general public.