The man who would marry Susan Sontag and other intimate literary portraits of the Bohemian Era

"Fresh from his exploits in the skies over occupied Europe during WWII, Air Force veteran Edward Field threw himself into New York's literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet in the decades before Stonewall. Only Greenwich Village, still cheap enough for young artists to live in, offered the freedom to be radical, write poetry, sit in orgone boxes, and be openly gay. Field's memoir becomes a portrait of his generation, for his friends included many of America's significant literary figures." "Beginning in World War II when a Red Cross lady put in his hands his first book of poetry, through his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and abroad, finally joining the last of the Village Bohemians holding out in Westbeth against the gentrified Village of today, Field opens the closet door to reveal, as they have never been seen before, some of the most important writers of his time: the young, beautiful Susan Sontag sitting at the feet of Alfred Chester, who plotted, shrewdly, to marry her; May Swenson and her two loves; the ambiguous marriage of Paul and Jane Bowles, and Paul's threat to rub out Alfred Chester; Field's affair with Frank O'Hara; Fritz Peters, the anointed son of Gurdjieff, and his fall from grace; poet Ralph Pomeroy, called le faux Truman Capote; and many others, including Isabel Miller (Patience and Sarah), James Baldwin, Tobias Schneebaum, and Robert Friend. These intimate portraits, woven into Field's own story, make this memoir a unique glimpse into postwar bohemia - by turns bawdy, comical, romantic, sad, and heroic."--Jacket.