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As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Bohemia provided a liminal territory between the regional and the national. This expansive cultural terrain mapped and at the same time displaced the divide between the national and the global. From its very beginnings of Pfaff's in New York City, American Bohemianism had promoted a cosmopolitan blend of cultural forms. Invoking the gypsies (via the Parisian Latin Quarter), Bohemia represented both sophistication and cultural degeneration. The debate over la vie bohème intensified at the turn of the century, with the familiar Bohemian-Bourgeois divide often highlighting a tension between more restrictive and more multicultural conceptions of national identity. Self-declared Bohemians aligned themselves with the latter and their opponents with the former. This chapter explores the cultural significance of multicultural and cosmopolitan “Bohemia,” with an emphasis on how Bohemia acted as a buffer zone between the nation and its new immigrants. It also looks at Frank Norris' account of “Bohemian” San Francisco.

The earliest Bohemians in the United States viewed the poetic landscapes of “Bohemia” and “Arcadia” as essentially interchangeable. Bret Harte, for instance, argued that there was little competition between Bohemia and the Arcadia of pastoral romance. Whereas the regional metonymizes the provincial and upholds traditional values, Bohemia represents urbane and risqué metropolitanism. Bohemia maps a spatial and temporal split between the rural/regional and the urban/national, aligning with the latter. At the same time, Bohemians rejected such antinomies. Regional variants of la vie bohème often took the form of periodicals flaunting “Bohemia” in their titles. These regional Bohemians aggressively and explicitly attempted to counteract the cultural hegemony of the Northeast and enabled a number of women writers to embrace the modernity of the “New Woman” from within their local cultures. Seizing upon the mythos of Bohemia, many women contributors articulated a progressive feminist politics and helped to revise existing conceptions of “regionalism” and women's literature.

The romance of Bohemia in France was popularized and largely invented by Henri Murger in the mid-nineteenth century. A decade later, Bohemianism reached the United States courtesy of a group of American writers, painters, and actors who sought to create a self-consciously American version of la vie bohème. From its inception, American Bohemianism has exploited the foreignness of Bohemia to launch cultural criticism, expand aesthetic possibilities, and promote cosmopolitan aspiration. This book explores how Bohemia was created in American literature and culture. It examines how Bohemia charted and tested “the boundaries of bourgeois life” and how it moved in and out of literary genres, styles, cultural institutions, and social geographies. It investigates how the earliest groups of U.S. Bohemians defined themselves through the imagined community of Bohemia, first in New York City and then in San Francisco. In addition, it considers the romance of Bohemia after it had become more broadly disseminated throughout the United States.

Bohemianism provides an integral standpoint from which to view the development of urban life and class formation in the United States. In order to discover the first self-identified American Bohemians, it is necessary to explore the counterculture unstably contained within the national geography of bourgeois identity, consciousness, and expression. This chapter focuses on the emergence of Bohemia in New York City in the late 1850s, focusing on Henry Clapp Jr. and Pfaff's beer cellar. An iconoclast who came from Paris, Clapp harbored the idea of recreating la vie bohème in Pfaff's beer cellar. His circle included Walt Whitman, who composed a poem entitled “The Vault at Pfaff's,” which he left unfinished. The chapter compares the Bohemians' self-descriptions to less favorable representations of the group, providing a case study in the (mutually constitutive) relationship between the Bohemians and their “bourgeois” antagonists. Many of the Bohemians who gathered at Pfaff's—such as journalists, artists, and poets—wrote for, or illustrated, Harper's, the New York Leader, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Press, which became the circle's house organ.

The paradoxical Bohemian-Bourgeois of today allegedly reconciles prototypical bohemian desires for rebellion, personal liberation, play, and self-indulgence (“culture of consumption”) with bourgeois values such as thrift, diligence, sobriety, and self-restraint (“culture of production”). More than a century ago, members of San Francisco's bourgeoisie and artistic community attempted to unite the Bohemian and the Bourgeois by forming an elite, all-male organization known as the Bohemian Club. Among its members were wealthy businessmen, leading politicians, Stanford and Berkeley professors, and writers and artists such as Jack London, Jules Tavernier, and Frank Norris. The Bohemian Club represents one of the first efforts in the United States to “synthesize” la vie bohème and clubbable capitalism. The club's midsummer encampments, dubbed the “Bohemian Grove,” promised a personal and collective transformation. Its promise of “Bohemia” became a locus of bourgeois desire and social experimentation, enabling a rethinking of bourgeois work and leisure ethics, gender roles, and spiritual commitments.