Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village

ISBN: 1884532748

Author: Robert Schulman

Condition: New

Americas fabled "Left Bank," Greenwich Village in New York, has been described, lauded, idealized and immortalized in numerous books -- but here, for the first time, author Robert Schulman tells the story of perhaps the Villages most vibrant citizen, the redoubtable Romany Marie Marchand, the acknowledged Earth Mother of the whole scene. From 1914 until the late 1950s she literally set the table for the 20th centurys American bohemian elite by running a series of taverns in the Village. To these places came Buckminster Fuller, Will and Ariel Durant, e.e. cummings, Theodore Dreiser, John Sloan, Burl Ives, Zero Mostel, Edgar Varese, Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Diego Rivera and hundreds of other shining lights of literature, art, theater and academia. At Maries taverns they found welcoming, fertile spaces where ideas took root. "You know what I am to them?" Marie said. "Im a legend. Im an idea. Many times, when such people get together, the thing they do is to talk about me and to reminisce. Where they started, how their work began. Oh yes, theyll say, was that in Maries Washington Square place, or in the one on Christopher Street? They can scarcely speak of their past without bringing in one of my centers, for that is what my places were -- not so much restaurants as centers for people to get off the edge of the ordinary." Derived from the exhaustive interviews conducted by Maries nephew, prize-winning journalist Bob Schulman, first begun in the 1940s and finally complete, Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village offers a fascinating and colorful glimpse into the true Bohemia by one of its most influential members.