“On or about December, 1910, human character changed,” Virgina Wolf said in London. But in New York’s Greenwich Village as well, a band of artists and intellectuals committed to free speech, free love, and progressive politics was giving birth to an American modernism that snuffed out the stodgy Victorian bourgeois century.
America’s first real counterculture of novelists, journalists, immigrant Jews, trade unionists, and political revolutionaries did with salon talk what Picasso was doing with collage in Paris: it tried to live and express what was real. The Bohemians wanted to bring democracy into their personal lives and put direct emotional into politics.
Many became famous later – like Georgia O’Keefe, Eugene O’Neil, and Margaret Sanger. They made New York into the ultimate American city and created an American brand of feminism that’s still working itself out today.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Christine Stansell, Author of “American Moderns”