Abstract
[...]Stansell’s book differs in significant ways from the other cultural biographies and also from Cowley’s story of the Village and a handful of its famous inhabitants. [...]it is rewarding that Princeton saw fit to reissue American Moderns in paperback with the author’s new preface. Within these always compellingly written chapters that make up the book sections, Stansell covers the expected: lifestyles that shocked the middle class, leftist politics that responded to changing circumstances of life and living, little magazines and the effort to take control of art, the up and down careers of John Reed and Emma Goldman, and new art as an organizing force in culture. In addition to the expected, however, there are extraordinary points and passages worth calling attention to: the importance of novelty in cosmopolitan 1890s Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, including the role of journalism in shaping the new bohemian culture (11-12ff) as well as the role of literature and conversation in the transformation of sexual mores (275); the idea he-man modernist (33); the importance of “the Jewish intelligentsia” to the New Woman (35); the division between the “New Man” and “New Woman” on the one hand and their working-class and African American neighbors on the other (43, 67); Oscar Hammerstein’s offer to Emma Goldman of the then high salary of a thousand dollars a week in 1913 to go on the vaudeville stage (85); the utterly fascinating story of the supreme importance of talk as a class, cultural, and political mediation mechanism (118-19, and in chapter 8, “Talking about Sex”); the place of reading, which “most of all, that gave the bohemians their sense of themselves as artists and their convictions about what exactly was modern” (160); the attention given to the emancipated woman “at the symbolic center of a program for cultural regeneration” (225); the revealing irony in the fact that many women successful still found it necessary to engage male sponsorship; and, finishing where Cowley begins, is Stansell’s overview of the effects of the First World War their relation to the decline of Village otherness (314ff).