Re: Greenwich Village radicals

[Mark Lause <lause@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The idea of being a "Bohemian" is much older.  Henry Clapp, a Fourierist
from Lynn, Massachusetts was one of a number of American radicals who went
to Paris in the 1840s and returned in hopes of building in New York
something like the creative milieu he had found there.  By the 1850s, the
expression was commonplace among the newspaper writers, particularly, but
more broadly to the literati.  Given the massive expansion of Horace
Greeley's TRIBUNE during that decade, it wasn't entirely unrealistic to
expect the newspaper writer encountered in the city to be iconoclastic and
radical.  At the time of the Civil War, "Bohemian" was used to describe the
press corps generally.

After the war, such professional writers as Charles Sotheran of the SLP were
mainstays of the New York Press Club.  ...and the list goes on.  By the
1890s, the notion of Bohemianism and its association with writers was
already well established.

Solidarity!
Mark Lause


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