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

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