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Epilogue In memoirs he published in the 1890s, William Dean Howells recalled his trip in 1860 to the center of American “Bohemia,” Pfaff’s Cellar in Manhattan. The young Howells, then a ›edgling writer, was excited to go, for Pfaff’s was known “so far West as Ohio” as the spot where radical artists, actors, and journalists (among them Walt Whitman) gathered in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and sex to form the nearest thing the United States had to the glamorous countercultures of Paris. But having sat in Pfaff’s and seen nothing but frail men with hangovers eating German pancakes (though Howells “staid hoping vainly for worse things”), Howells recalled this “Bohemia” as a “sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking roots in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.” Even the actual denizens of the 1850s New York Bohemia, according to what Howells apparently later discovered, “thought the pose a vain and unpro‹table one.”1 What was this “Bohemia” that Howells visited? On the one hand, as both Joanna Levin and Mark A. Lause have recently argued, New York’s Bohemia in the late 1850s was, in the context of the United States, an unprecedented, genuinely modern countercultural space, a forerunner, according to Levin, of the more profound segregation of aesthetic and artistic culture from the world of America’s wealthy and white-collar business classes that would occur by the end of the nineteenth century.2 Born rather suddenly in 1855, New York’s Bohemia was the brainchild of Henry Clapp Jr., a middle-aged temperance lecturer and abolitionist who had recently returned from a long sojourn in Paris dazzled by la vie 248 de Bohème of Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Baudelaire and determined to launch a similar experiment in New York. Commandeering Pfaff’s beer cellar on Broadway just north of Bleeker Street, Clapp gathered around him a lively group of artists and writers, which swelled in its heyday to almost two hundred members and included, apart from Whitman, such New York luminaries as the travel writer Bayard Taylor, the poet Richard Henry Stoddard, the actress and author Ada Clare, the “hashish eater” Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the comedian Artemus Ward, and the Poe-esque horror writers Fitz-James O’Brien and Charles D. Gardette, among others. Clapp himself, as editor of the group’s organ , the Saturday Press, was crowned the “King of Bohemia” and “King Devilmaycare.” Conceived as New York’s alternative to stuffy Boston and to a “mainstream” America ruled by “Mrs. Grundy,” the Saturday Press was ‹lled with jaunty accounts of Bohemian brilliance, drunkenness, and revelry. Pfaff’s was “the anvil from which ›y the brightest scintillations of the hour; this is the womb of the best things that society has heard from man-a-day; this is the trysting-place for the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York,—journalists, artists, and poets.”3 The chief difference between the eccentric Bohemian, as described in the pages of the Saturday Press, and his eccentric forebears in early nineteenth-century Byronism was his gusto and self-satisfaction, his delight in the company of his friends, in conversation, in meals, in his pipe, and in his endless, beguiling exploration of the metropolis. The Bohemian was not tortured but happy and glad to be living on the fringes of the stultifying conventionality of the middle class. In many ways, one could argue, the New York Bohemia of Whitman and Clapp was a kind of expression of a real rift between the culture of art and the culture of mass entertainment production. Indeed, we can speculate that the difference between these later views of outsider artists and the earlier ones lay in the socioeconomic landscape that writers by the late 1850s had come to occupy. In the 1830s, romantic myths of authorial eccentricity were foundational to evolving systems of mass print production that had grown out of and continued to thrive on a combination of highly speculative, often guerrilla-style publishing practices and a literary culture long oriented around authorial volunteerism and self-capitalization. By the late 1850s, however, this world of micro-players was gone. American books and periodicals were not just selling in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds of thousands; and the audiences for these were no longer regional but continental and transnational...

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