Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians

In the shadow of the Civil War, a circle of radicals in a rowdy saloon changed American society and helped set Walt Whitman on the path to poetic immortality.

Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists- regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan-rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand-up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln. This vibrant tale, packed with original research, offers the pleasures of a great group biography like The Banquet Years or The Metaphysical Club. Justin Martin shows how this first bohemian culture-imported from Paris to a dingy Broadway saloon-seeded and nurtured an American tradition of rebel art that thrives to this day.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 09/02/2014
ISBN: 9780306822261
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.40w x 1.50d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 06/30/2014
Booklist 08/01/2014 pg. 26
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2014
Library Journal 09/01/2014 pg. 106
Choice 02/01/2015 pg. 973