Visit our Audio/Visual webpage for dynamic content. Join the co-authors Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey for a video tour of American Cultural Rebels. This page also includes interviews from other media sources. Click here to go to the Audio/Visual page.

. . . Encounter America’s artistic vanguards—the creators and destroyers—their followers and critics. Retrace the path of the avant-garde, a European import, from its arrival in America to its emergence as a source of cultural rebellion.

Discover bohemia, offspring of romanticism, and how it served as an alternative way of life that persisted late into the 20th century, inspiring the 1960s countercultures that transformed America. . . .

"Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey's new work, America's Cultural Rebels: Avant-Gardes and Countercultures, widens the scope and heightens the impact of this kind of cultural history."

--John Sinclair

"America's Cultural Rebels is well-researched, authoritative, useful, and--a bonus--immensely readable. This is not only an important book, it is also a necessary book. I'm genuinely grateful for it. "

--Ed McClanahan
Author of Famous People I Have Known, O the Clear Moment, and other books

Click here to read Oakland University's article by Laura Angus

Click here to read a review by Oakland University English Professor Brian Murphy

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Table of Contents

Preface

I. FATAL DESTINIES
Restless Youth: The Roots of Nineteenth-Century Countercultures      5
Visions of Utopia      9
Apprentices in the City of Light      12
The Arrival of Bohemia      15

II. GILDED AGE VANGUARDS
Bohemian Frontiers      21
Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans      25
Bohemian Clubs      27
Stirrings Across the Sea      29
American Aesthetes      32
The Trilby Craze      34
Bohemian Demimondes      36
Symbolists and Decadents      39

III. MODERN TEMPERS, MODERN TIMES
Crosscurrents of Liberation      47
Jack London’s Piedmont Crowd      51
Anarchists, Moderns, and the Robert Henri Circle      54
Stieglitz and Stein, Proponents of the New      57
Poetry in Porkopolis      61

IV. “CITY OF AMBITION”
Modernism’s Storm Center      68
Voices of Young America      69
Assemblages of a Different Kind      73
The Village Idea      83

V. AMERICANS IN PARIS
A Lost Generation?      89
The Left Bank      92
The Free City of Montmartre      94
American Enclaves      96
Independent Presses, Little Magazines      100
Life Among the Dadaists and Surrealists      103
A Musical Training Ground      107
Moderns on the Riviera      112

VI. THE SEARCH FOR AMERICA
The Primacy of Place      115
Stieglitz’s Constellation      116
“Land of Buried Cultures”      117
Hollywood Decadence      119
“Paris in My Own Backyard”      121
The Chicagoans      125
“Harlem Nocturne”      127
The Village Transformed      131

VII. RADICALS AND MODERNS
The Turn Leftward      134
Theater of Revolt      143
The Mainstreaming of Modernism      147

VIII. “BOHEMIA AFTER DARK”: MODERN JAZZ AND THE BEAT GENERATION
Bebop Makes the Scene      155
The Epitome of Hip      159
Beats of the New Vision      162
San Francisco’s Angel-Headed Hipsters      168
The Beat of the Beat Generation      171
Voices of the Village      173
Beatnik Bohemias      175

IX. THE 1960S MUSICAL AVANT-GARDES
Experiments of the Mind, Experiments of the Machine      178
Electronic Composers      179
The Jazz Freedom Principle      181
Trane and Miles      184

X. THE ADVERSARY CULTURE
“Revolution in the Air”      190
Duchamp’s Shadow      190
The Living Theatre      193
Happenings      195
East Village Others      197
California’s Musical Rainbow      201
L.A. Freak-out      211

Epilogue      217
Chapter Notes      221
Bibliography      233
Index      251

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