The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village
*Starred Review* Cultural journalist Strausbaugh (Sissy Nation, 2008), a man of rattling opinions, makes all the legends about Greenwich Village and its bohemians new and vital in his sizzling and capacious history, by virtue of his archaeologically deep and patient research, vigorous style, and keen admiration for those who made the Village a world-altering “cultural engine.” He has retrieved stories of the forgotten and the famous, from the African Americans who farmed the bucolic land in the 1600s to such luminaries as Margaret Sanger, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Baldwin, Jackson Pollock, and Bob Dylan. Strausbaugh cleverly anchors each phase in his ever-branching chronicle to the hot spot of the time, from Pfaff’s, in Walt Whitman’s era, to the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas downed his last whiskey; the Cedar Street Tavern, hangout of the abstract expressionists; and the writers’ bar, the Lion’s Head, where Norman Mailer held court. Strausbaugh goes into astounding detail in his coverage of the Village’s radical politics and quest for sexual freedom, paying particular attention to its thriving homosexual community. Though now, as Strausbaugh duly records, the Village is a sanitized bastion of the wealthy, in its golden days, its diverse artists “collided and fused like subatomic particles in an accelerator, unleashing an explosion of creativity” that is still sending out shock waves. --Donna Seaman