Bohemians, Beats and Blues People

This fourth collection of essays and reviews hopefully provides a useful and entertaining survey of various writers and others who might be said to slot easily into the category of bohemians. I have, admittedly, included some writers who perhaps wouldn't have welcomed being called bohemians. Kurt Vonnegut, Gilbert Sorrentino, and James T.Farrell, for example. But it can be argued that most writers have at least a touch of the bohemian about them, and only those desperate for respectability need to deny it. It may all depend on how you define a bohemian. It's a term that extends far beyond the popular conception of someone who has a free-and-easy life-style that has links, however tenuous, to the arts. There are several essays dealing with little magazines. They seem to me to be essential to any study of 20th Century literature. This Quarter, Blues, and Contact between them say a great deal about the literature of the 1920s and 1930s if you want to look beyond the well-known.