All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 Saturday, August 1 2009.

• They were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them--to be wives and mothers--and decided to live on their own terms. In the process, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit. There's Mina Loy, a modernist poet and much-photographed beauty who traveled in pivotal international art circles; blues divas Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the lyric poet who, with her earthy charm and passion, embodied the '20s ideal of sexual daring; the avant-garde publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; and the wealthy hostesses of the salons, A'Lelia Walker and Mabel Dodge. Among the supporting cast are Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Ma Rainey, Margaret Sanger, and Gertrude Stein. Andrea Barnet's fascinating accounts of the emotional and artistic lives of these women--together with rare black-and-white photographs, taken by photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Man Ray--capture the women in all their glory. This is a history of the early feminists who didn't set out to be feminists, a celebration of the rebellious women who paved the way for future generations.

Shelfari edited the contributors of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: Andrea Barnet: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 Friday, July 17 2009.

• When the exquisitely impulsive Louise Brooks, a teenage Ziegfeld Follies girl, stepped off the train from her native Kansas and glanced up at the soaring Manhattan skyline, she "fell in love with New York forever."