Republic of Dreams : Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 [Hardcover]

Ross Wetzsteon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2002

A rich and spirited history of Greenwich Village's Golden Age and of the rebels, artists and eccentrics who made the Village the centre of America's bohemian and cultural life. It has been called 'the most significant square mile in American cultural history' and 'the place where everything happens first.' And while it may be true that 'Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be' (a phrase that was uttered as early as 1916), this legendary New York neighborhood has made a lasting impact on American life. Now, based on ten years of research, REPUBLIC OF DREAMS tells the fascinating story of 'the Village' and its extraordinary residents. From the first decade of the twentieth century through the sixties, rebellious men and women from all over the country flocked to the Village to fulfil their artistic, political and personal dreams. Emma Goldman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, Jackson Pollock, Margaret Sanger, Delmore Schwartz, Thomas Wolfe and more came to a bohemian enclave that would become an integral part of their careers. Ross Wetzsteon's lively history examines the tempestuous Village lives of these American icons and places their personal stories within greater social contexts, including the rise and fall of American socialism, the struggle for women's suffrage, and the commericalisation of the avant garde.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

New York's Greenwich Village, "the most significant square mile in American cultural history" and "home of half the talent and half the eccentricity in the country," is the subject of Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams, an enthusiastic and rigorous biography of place. From the Village sprung American socialism, gay liberation, the YMCA, the American Civil Liberties Union, The Reader's Digest, the phrase "I heard it through the grapevine," the Colt .45 revolver, and America's first night court, for starters. It was in the Village where Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet and the buffalo nickel was designed. Wetzsteon is primarily interested in the place between the years 1910 (when, he says, it became a "self-conscious bohemian and radical community") and 1960, when cultural boundaries "blurred" and the "hegemony of 'the normal'" disappeared. This is not a "walking tour" of famous hangouts so much as a portrait built on a chronological series of richly detailed biographies of Village denizens renowned, notorious, and relatively obscure, including Max Eastman, E.E. Cummings, Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, a Who's Who of American feminists, Eugene O'Neill, and Mabel Dodge. Wetzsteon, who died in 1998, revels in the Village's inherent chaos, contradictions, and mutation, and never succumbs to "golden age" nostalgia. As his daughter writes in an afterword, "the Village is dead; long live the Village." Republic of Dreams, eminently readable, unflaggingly perceptive, and immaculately researched, is, arguably, the seminal study to date of America's most fertile literary, artistic, and political geographical dot. --H. O'Billovich

From Publishers Weekly

This engaging history by Village Voice drama critic Wetzsteon, who died in 1998, will appeal most to readers unfamiliar with the many previous books and memoirs by the rebels, dreamers and plain old nut cases who have found refuge from conformism in New York City's most famous neighborhood for more than a century. Organized as a series of portraits in roughly chronological order, the text focuses largely on the Village's first golden era, the years just before WWI, when "justice and poetry seemed complementary goals." Movers and shakers from this period include legendary hostess Mabel Dodge, The Masses editor Max Eastman and such boundary-shattering "New Women" as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Margaret Sanger. By the time we've moved through profiles of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe and Djuna Barnes, we're still reading about the 1930s. Coverage of the '50s is mostly limited to the sad later years of Delmore Schwartz and Dawn Powell; the book closes with a chapter on Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists that barely reaches 1960. "Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be," a comment made as early as 1916, is a principal theme of Wetzsteon, who stresses that "from its very birth, bohemia seemed to exist in the past," a mythical moment before the tourists and poseurs moved in. They were always there, as his sympathetic sketches of cranks like Joe Gould and Elsa von Freytag suggest: "the essence of the Village was to create a miniature society where personal idiosyncrasies could flourish through communal solidarity." Though the progression of stories seems to lack a driving narrative line, perhaps this collection of affectionate set pieces truly approximates the freewheeling Village spirit. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First edition (June 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684869950
• ISBN-13: 978-0684869957
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Glorious Yet Tragic Life of the Village, May 9, 2005

By 

R. DelParto "Rose2" (Virginia Beach, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Republic of Dreams : Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 (Hardcover)

Ross Wetzsteon examines the remarkable life of a handful of distinctive writers and artists that made Greenwich Village for what it was - a refuge for the bohemians that came from all points of the United States from 1910-1960. REPUBLIC OF DREAMS tells the story of the core of writers that drifted in an out of the Village during its most creative and innovative period, and displays an intimate and intense portrait of the most vibrant time in literary and cultural history. Wetzsteon brings the Village alive with the numerous stories that offer a glimpse of the person behind the person, which presents each writer or artist as humanly as possible -- self-absorbed, narcissistic, and always striving to maintain marginality as a means to creativity in their insular middle class upbringing (568). He parallels the difficult and at times, the idiosyncratic experiences that each subject faced to their spontaneous creativity. Hauntingly, their lives mirrored the novels and poems that they wrote may have followed the moniker of "live hard and die young." It is unfortunate that this became true for writers, such as Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollack, and Dylan Thomas. However, others lived over the age of 50 despite living with their insane demons -- John Gould, Djuna Barnes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay; while others lived the starving artist life - William Carlos Williams and the Eminent Villagers mentioned in chapters six and chapter seven.


REPUBLIC OF DREAMS contains and immense collection of stories that Wetzsteon painstakingly compiled and researched. It is unfortunate that it isn't a complete narrative, but comes close in spite of Wetzsteon's untimely death in 1998, which is mentioned in the Afterword. This could have been volume one of a two volume set due to the enormous content of the book, 619 (569 of narrative) pages. The period in which he presents spans 50 years of Village life, and he does not cover every character that lived within this vicious circle of unrestrained eccentricity and vitality. Despite the number of pages, that should not discount anyone from exploring this important part of Americana. No one can say that these inhabitants of the Village lived a lackluster life, but one that overflowed with great extremity.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Village-Sized Biographies, September 29, 2002

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Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Republic of Dreams : Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 (Hardcover)

The late Ross Westzsteon had crammed this big book with a wonderful amount of love and research and it shows on every page. Republic of Dreams (Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960) consists of mini-biographies for chapters as it is not so much a history of the Village as it is a history of the significant people who made the Village their home, sometimes briefly and sometime for life. The idea is presented that the Village was only truly the Village as it exists in lore in the 1910s. Three-quarters of the book is devoted to this period and this is the funniest, most touching and most fascinating part of the book. All of the lives covered in this first period intersect creating a true picture of a community of artists, actors, writers, labour leaders, society matrons, anarchists and hangers-on that create a unified whole in the book. The last quarter of the book (covering the next forty years) feels a little uncooked, while still being interesting. This book is an incredible place to spend a number of hours and a great chance to meet the people who made the Village the Village.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Whatever else bohemia may be, it is almost always yesterday.", March 21, 2009

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 (Paperback)

Let's dispense with a misconception caused by the title of this excellent collection: the book is not really a traditional "history" of Greenwich Village. As the introduction acknowledges, the nearly 600 pages do not chronicle the neighborhood's events and hangouts, its architecture and commerce, its ethnic diversity and working-class character. Instead, the Ross Wetzteon presents biographical vignettes of "its writers and artists and intellectuals, its radicals and bohemians, eccentrics and prophets," many of whom migrated to Manhattan from elsewhere and created a social and intellectual laboratory. The geographical area known as the Village (along with its summertime counterpart, Provincetown) features largely as a backdrop to a generous sampling of countercultural lives.

With those caveats in mind, then, "Republic of Dreams" is still a must-have for anyone interested in New York history or with the rise of twentieth-century radical politics and social libertarianism. Famous Villagers--from Emma Goldman and Eugene O'Neill to Djuna Barnes and Hart Crane to Delmore Schwartz and Dawn Powell--mix it up with lesser-know eccentrics and crazies, including the Baroness, Harry Kemp, Doris the Dope, and Joe Gould (infamous for an unpublished masterwork that probably never existed). The book also gives extensive attention to the succession of journals--especially The Masses, Mother Earth, Liberator, The Dial, Others, and The Little Review--whose enduring national influence belied their modest circulations, editorial squabbles, precarious finances, and legal troubles.

Wetzteon's biographical chapters include hundreds of hilarious, sordid, and sorrowful memories and anecdotes. There's E. E. Cummings screaming across the Patchin Place courtyard, "Are ya still alive, Djuna?" Robert Clairmont, the original deep-pocketed party monster, complained that "the life of pleasure is hard." Dawn Powell lamented, "A woman needed two lovers, one to comfort her for the torment the other caused her." Surveying the landscape of his friends' unconventional tendencies, William Carlos Williams noted that "intellectuals began to intrude on the terrain opened by the lunatic fringe"--and that fringe is well represented here.

If the book has a weakness, it's that Wetzteon does tend to focus on the dismal shadows of the Village's various subcultures. Somebody who had never been to Manhattan might be forgiven for thinking that bohemianism is composed almost entirely of marital squabbles (and the sexual freedom that often caused them), alcoholic binges, and recurrent homelessness. There is a surfeit of nightmares in the "Republic of Dreams"; all too many of its intellects and artists died young or unhappy--or both. And the lucky survivors of each generation mourn the passing of the Village of their youth; bohemia repeatedly loses out to nostalgia. But, if anything, these stories of the Village's unforgettable residents cumulatively prove that for every counterculture that sinks into oblivion or enters the mainstream, there is a new demimonde ready to take its place.