The Outer Limits
nytimes.comTHE SHORES OF BOHEMIA: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960 By John Taylor Williams There is something ineffable about the appeal of the outer reaches of Cape Cod to generations of writers, artists and architects.
Maybe it’s simply that, as Thoreau observed, “a man may stand there and put all America behind him.” Maybe — and this was certainly true for the first part of the 20th century — it was the place’s remoteness and isolation, the sense that as the land reaches out toward the Atlantic, in a single long, crooked limb, the present conventional world slips away, allowing you to rethink, reinvent and get away with all manner of things.
Maybe a sort of pre-modern living — with so few amenities and creature comforts — drew the urban cliques who gravitated there, repelled as many were by the excesses of capitalism.
Still, the scope of the attraction is astounding. In John Taylor Williams’s account of 50 years of bohemian life in and around the last three towns on Cape Cod, “The Shores of Bohemia,” you’re almost overwhelmed with famous names.
