From Publishers Weekly
With a neatly composed set of intersecting biographies, journalist Barnet engagingly illustrates the extraordinary period of cultural freedom for American women that came after whalebone corsets of the Victorian era were loosed and before the privations of the Depression sucked the gumption out of the nation. Barnet uses New York as the red-hot locus where these women met, mingled, made love and made art. At the book's heart are eight creators. In Greenwich Village, modernist poet and artist Mina Loy wrote her manifesto "Aphorisms on Futurism." Nearby, the winsome Edna St. Vincent Millay burned her candle at both ends in a cold-water flat, breaking cultural rules and several suitors' hearts. Editors and lovers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap constructed the influential arts magazine Little Review, which climaxed with the serial publication of Joyce's Ulysses. Uptown, in Harlem, blues divas like the wild Bessie Smith and coy Ethel Waters crooned to audiences of blacks and whites alike. A'Lelia Walker, the richest black woman in America, hosted a salon where, "besides the usual throng of artists, dancers, jazz musicians, poets, journalists, critics, and novelists, one might see English Rothschilds, French princesses, Russian grand dukes, mobsters, prizefighters, men of the stock exchange and Manhattan's social elite, elegant homosexuals, Village bohemians, white movie celebrities, and smartly dressed employees of the U.S. Post Office." Barnet's treatment of this scintillating era is as lively and appealing as the women she's writing about. B&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The span between 1913 and 1930 was a time of scandal-laced creativity for New York City's fierce Bohemian spirits, who tended to congregate in two centers: Greenwich Village and Harlem. Barnet focuses on that era's bold feminists, including Mina Loy, a beautiful modernist poet, and Margaret Anderson and her lover, Jane Heap, founders of the famed Little Review. These blazing talents crossed paths with other creative women, such as the sexually daring poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; social activists Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger; the revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan; and blues divas Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. They met at (in)famous salons like Mabel Dodge's, and their creative cross-pollinations were to shape an age, attitude, and a feminist movement for decades to come. Barnet's beautifully detailed portraits of these pioneering women are delicately shaded, filled with resonating emotional nuance, and surrounded by such stellar supporting characters as Carl Van Vechten, Edmund Wilson, and Djuna Barnes. Boasting Man Ray photos and Beatrice Wood drawings, copious end notes and bibliography, All Night Party is sure to arouse great interest. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
They were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them--to be wives and mothers--and decided to live on their own terms. In the process, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit.

There's Mina Loy, a modernist poet and much-photographed beauty who traveled in pivotal international art circles; blues divas Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the lyric poet who, with her earthy charm and passion, embodied the '20s ideal of sexual daring; the avant-garde publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; and the wealthy hostesses of the salons, A'Lelia Walker and Mabel Dodge. Among the supporting cast are Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Ma Rainey, Margaret Sanger, and Gertrude Stein.

Andrea Barnet's fascinating accounts of the emotional and artistic lives of these women--together with rare black-and-white photographs, taken by photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Man Ray--capture the women in all their glory.

This is a history of the early feminists who didn't set out to be feminists, a celebration of the rebellious women who paved the way for future generations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the early part of the twentieth century, New York City was a hotbed of creativity and scandal. Meet the women at the heart of it. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them -- to become wives and mothers -- and decided to live on their own terms. In doing so, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit. The milieu included Mina Loy, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Anderson, A'Lelia Walker, Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Djuna Barnes, Ma Rainey, Margaret Sanger, and Gertrude Stein. These women never stopped believing that there were new ways to move through the world as women. As they blasted the door open to the rest of the century, they ignited the imaginations of all the generations that followed.

SYNOPSIS

Art and culture critic Barnet recounts the exploits of the free- spirited bohemian women of New York City during the period 1913-1930. Coverage includes (for example) salon hostess Louise Arensberg, modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and blues singer Bessie Smith. The material in this volume was originally published in 2001 in German translation under the title Crazy New York: Die Frauen von Harlem und Greenwich Village by Edition Ebersbach, Berlin. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

We all know that Edna St. Vincent Millay burned her candle at both ends, but not necessarily that she spoke baby talk to her husband. This series of short biographies is a case-history candy box. The poet Mina Loy is shown in all her beauty and reckless flamboyance, abandoning two children in Italy, having a third in England and then parking it with the earlier two, and ending up on the Bowery, making sculptures out of egg crates and clothespins. This eclectic assortment of the daring, the devastating, and the derelict includes hostesses like Mabel Dodge and A’Lelia Walker, singers like Ethel Waters, and the editors of the Little Review. Barnet paints her subjects as pioneering feminists in revolt against established mores, though, arguably, money was almost as important as a spur to eccentricity; it is instructive that the collective good times came to an end with the crash of 1929.

Publishers Weekly

With a neatly composed set of intersecting biographies, journalist Barnet engagingly illustrates the extraordinary period of cultural freedom for American women that came after whalebone corsets of the Victorian era were loosed and before the privations of the Depression sucked the gumption out of the nation. Barnet uses New York as the red-hot locus where these women met, mingled, made love and made art. At the book's heart are eight creators. In Greenwich Village, modernist poet and artist Mina Loy wrote her manifesto "Aphorisms on Futurism." Nearby, the winsome Edna St. Vincent Millay burned her candle at both ends in a cold-water flat, breaking cultural rules and several suitors' hearts. Editors and lovers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap constructed the influential arts magazine Little Review, which climaxed with the serial publication of Joyce's Ulysses. Uptown, in Harlem, blues divas like the wild Bessie Smith and coy Ethel Waters crooned to audiences of blacks and whites alike. A'Lelia Walker, the richest black woman in America, hosted a salon where, "besides the usual throng of artists, dancers, jazz musicians, poets, journalists, critics, and novelists, one might see English Rothschilds, French princesses, Russian grand dukes, mobsters, prizefighters, men of the stock exchange and Manhattan's social elite, elegant homosexuals, Village bohemians, white movie celebrities, and smartly dressed employees of the U.S. Post Office." Barnet's treatment of this scintillating era is as lively and appealing as the women she's writing about. B&w photos. (Mar. 26) Forecast: March is National Women's History Month, and national publicity and promos around that time, coupled with national advertising, could help this book find a market. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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