About The Book

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

Praise

“A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics that flourished in lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s.” —Alix Kates Shulman, The Nation

“A beautifully written—and brave—memoir. It’s told with heart and unsparing honesty that becomes every woman’s story . . . I was deeply touched.” —Gloria Naylor

“As a memoir of the times, it is a valuable social document.” —The New York Times Book Review

“This is a story every American ought to read; written by someone who is generous and loving. The writing is easy, effortless, honest, like a letter from a friend, but this artful book is full of history.” —Jamaica Kincaid