Thursday, October 20

I have always found bohemian culture interesting, especially when it has identifiable geographic pockets like Greenwich Village in New York, where poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and reporter/writer John Reed (who chronicled the communist revolution in Russia) thrived.  Later the Beat Generation would call the Village home: Kerouac; Ginsberg; and Burroughs.  In London’s Bloomsbury district, intellectuals like writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes flourished.   In Paris’ Left Bank of the Seine river, expatriates like James Joyce, Samuel Becket, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway wrote and were published by small presses that sprung up.  Later, across the ocean came the Beats Ginsberg and Burroughs to the Left Bank.  Their friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti had already left from his doctoral studies in literature at the Sorbonne to open City Lights books in San Francisco to provide a publishing outlet for the Beat writers.