This is an anecdotal history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood, from the 1600s to the present. The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions, from "half-free" Africans to working-class immigrants, from artists to politicians, for almost four hundred years. In this book, the author weaves a narrative history of the Village, a tapestry...

What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost...