Bohemians: A Graphic History
After three pages on the Parisian origins of cultural bohemia, coeditor Buhle’s latest comics anthology confines itself to America—mostly to New York City, though San Francisco gets a few nods—except for one subchapter, “Les salons de Paris,” on post-WWI American expats. It’s primarily a procession of profiles of specific people punctuated by accounts of particularly important phenomena (e.g., “Oscar Wilde in America,” “Germans and Jews, the Ethnic Bohemians”) that include further profiles. Walt Whitman receives a full chapter. Subchapters cover free-love propagandist and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, party-giver and patroness Mabel Dodge, Harlem Renaissance kingpin Claude McKay, novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten, singer-dancer Josephine Baker, and others. Though granting that bohemians weren’t, “in any consistent way, political-minded,” radical historian Buhle tilts the presentation to the Left, presumably with the ardent assent of his coeditor, Berger, a vocal occupier of Wall Street. The wide variety of illustrators involved come mostly from the alternative-comics scene, and the book is dedicated to the late underground artist Spain Rodriguez, whose two-pager on Henry Miller opens chapter 6. --Ray Olson