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  • Chapter 14 - Disaster, Apocalypse, and After

  • from City Lives
  • Edited by Kevin R. McNamara, University of Houston-Clear Lake
  • Book:
    The City in American Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    05 August 2021, pp 232-244

  • Summary

    While the term “bohemian” has fallen out of favor, the desire to explore alternative lifestyles that challenge mainstream social expectations remains. Focusing mainly on the Beat Generation writers but including a broad range of other bohemian groups both past and present, this chapter explores the reasons for bohemia’s demise, makes an honest assessment of its shortcomings, and attempts to redeem what is worthwhile from the concept. Despite its paradoxes and problems, there are good reasons to retain a bohemian ideal that brings the contradictions in everyday life into sharper focus, even if the future of bohemia might not be urban. At its best, the bohemian desire to live a fuller life outside society’s margins functions as a utopian gesture that challenges our media-obsessed culture with a focus on the personal and inner-directed. In such a world, bohemia is as difficult to enact as it is necessary for those who want to define life and its possibilities for themselves.