Writing a New Nation: Literary Bohemianism and the Re-conceiving of America

This review compares Michael Soto's The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Michael Hrebeniak's Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form in order to explore the role of bohemianism in modernist American literary movements. Both argue that such movements are formed as reactions to the prevailing social order, and seek to provide America with new cultural models. While Soto's work is somewhat ambivalent about the ultimate possibility of literary rebellion in the modernist period, Hrebeniak believes that Jack Kerouac and the "action writing" that he represents posed a direct challenge to post-World War II culture.