Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde

This book tells the story of the first American avant-garde in art, poetry and the theatre. The people discussed in this book include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp and the Stettheimer sisters. The author suggests that this exchange of ideas transformed modern culture. Quotations from letters, diaries and interviews enliven this history. The development of the avant-garde depended as much on social intercourse, whether sexual, suppressed or platonic, as on aesthetics. By the time of the 1913 Armory Show, bohemia had made a home for itself in New York's Greenwich Village.