At some point in the recent history of western civilization, a big cultural change occurred-in Europe, but especially in the United States. This change was so complicated that scholars really can’t grasp it completely. There was the nineteenth century, and then there was the twentieth-so very different from each other, in art, in music, in literature, in how people lived, in political beliefs, in our expectations of each other-what on earth was this all about? Did it have to do with wars? With technology? With religion? What?
Here are some books that, in their ways, try to deal with this change (which by the way we’re still undergoing).
Modernism: the lure of heresy: from Baudelaire to Beckett and beyond by Peter Gay suggests that there was a kind of tension between bourgeois and creative individuals, such that the one formed the audience for the other, and creative individuals bounced their creative product off the more staid expectations of the bourgeois-with exceptions. What this needed was city life, good communication, relative peace (during WWI and WWII, and during the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, creativity was stifled) and disposable income. Gay is not sure that this tension is still going on.
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920’s by Ann Douglas
An absolutely smashing book if you are untroubled by the enormous burden it bears of her thesis about the feminization of American culture, and just focus on the detail about all the creativity, angst, excitement, and despair, swirling around the streets of New York (with appendixes in Paris and elsewhere) A cast of thousands-from Freud and Edward Bernays, to Louise Brooks and Ethel Waters.
American moderns: Bohemian New York and the creation of a new 
by Christine Stansell
Another top-notch discussion focusing on certain keynoters-Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, John Reed-Stansell compares like figures to illuminate the roles of each in the cultural big change, and her portraits are irresistible. John Reed compared to Isaak Babel is especially memorable, and not at all flattering to Reed.
Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde by Steven Watson
A delightful big book that sets out to describe the associations among American (and some European) intellectuals participating in the creation of an American culture before WWI. Watson’s gossipy take is only a small part of the story, but his descriptions are clear and focused. What was behind the fight between Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell? What about the relationship among John Reed, Eugene O’Neill, and Louise Bryant? Unfortunately, out of print – get this one via interlibrary loan.
Republic of dreams: Greenwich Village the American Bohemia, 1910-1960 by Ross Wetzsteon
This book covers much of the same ground as the Watson book mentioned above, but extends further into time-into the 1930’s, the political radicalization of the denizens of the Village during the Depression, and their reactions to the development of fascism in Europe. Interesting portraits of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. Wetzsteon believes that the unique environment of Greenwich Village both energized and isolated people who lived there (an idea developed by Peter Gay).
Among the bohemians: Experiments in living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicolson
Generally disappointing, although it does take on the big topic-along with what they wore, whether they could live without servants, and Who was With Whom. These English avant-garde types remind me of the lady in the Orwell novel Burmese Days who ate her meals off a magazine, tearing off the old page after each meal – pretty squalid lives.
~ John S.
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