Scorning the devastation that industrialization had wrought on the nation's workforce and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, artists, writers, activists gathered in the streets of Greenwich Village and on the beachfronts of Cape Cod. They began as progressives but soon turned to socialism, then communism. They founded theaters, periodicals, and art schools, and welcomed the wave of talent fleeing Europe in the 1930s. At the end of their era, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism when the anticapitalist movement fragmented into other causes. Williams records a great set of shifts in American culture and the ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year conversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries as they created some of the great works of the American Century. - adapted from jacket