Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury - Softcover

Klein, Ms. Carole

4.05

21 ratings by Goodreads

9780801862977: Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801862973 ISBN 13: 9780801862977

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

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New York's Gramercy Park was the Bloomsbury of America. Here Samuel Ruggles, who created Gramercy Park, hosted a grand ball for the visiting celebrity Charles Dickens and his "fat little wife." Here Walt Whitman gratefully accepted from Richard Watson Gilder a rare invitation to a party at a time when few found the poet of Leaves of Grass socially acceptable. Edwin Booth, paralyzed by remorse over his brother's assassination of the president, here sat silently behind drawn curtains. And here O. Henry searched the faces of New York's first underground travelers for the tales he would write about the city he called "Bagdad on the Subway."

Gramercy Park brings to life a place and time of dazzling intellectual achievement. Walk with Henry James, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, George Bellows, and scores of others in an intimate tour of the extraordinary place that helped shape the literary and artistic values of modern America.

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About the Author:

Carole Klein is the author of Aline, a biography of Aline Bernstein (mentor and lover of Thomas Wolfe); Mothers and Sons; The Myth of the Happy Child; The Single Parent Experience; and Overcoming Regret: Lessons from the Road Not Taken. She is a member of the writing faculty of New School University in New York City, PEN, the Author's League, and the Biography Seminar of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Gramercy Park neighborhood with its London-like square, which became 19th century Manhattan's cultural center, was created in 1831 by Samuel Ruggles, a visionary lawyer and real-estate investor, and his son-in-law George Templeton Strong, a man of broad artistic and literary interests. In this well-researched study, Klein (Aline, etc.) vividly recreates the bustling activity of New York's commercial and social life surrounding the park's serene residential enclave, now a landmark area, where artists and stage and opera stars mingled with writers, business and civic leaders and philanthropists. Its elegant homes and the Players' and National Arts clubs, located on the square, harbored George Bellows, Stanford White, Edwin Booth, a galaxy of authors including Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, publisher James Harper, Gov. Samuel Tilden, Cyrus Field, William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper, among others, and played host to overseas celebrities such as Nellie Melba, Sarah Bernhardt and William Thackeray. An amusing chapter depicts social gatherings of the 1920s and '30s, lively parties given by arts arbiter Carl Van Vechten, and the more formal entertaining of ghetto-bred, celebrity press agent Ben Sonnenberg. Illustrated.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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