Beyond the Image: The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik

On the site of San Francisco's Transamerica Tower, there once stood a four story building known as the Monkey Block, though its proper name was the Montgomery Building. This area was once the city's notorious red-light district, which went by the name the Barbary Coast, but it was also the center of San Francisco's thriving bohemian culture. 

The Monkey Block was the home for the artists, writers, actors, musicians and others who flocked to the city starting in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. The noted photographer Dorothea Lange became a part of the lifestyle there, after arriving in 1918 from New Jersey. She first was a society portrait photographer but her interests changed and she became known as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Great Depression, taking many indelible images of the plight of the migrants who went west during the period's worst days, and battled the drought of the Dust Bowl along with their lack of money and employment. 

The Bohemians tells a novelized version of her life story in an imagined first person account that incorporates many actual biographical facts, along with the many significant individuals who made up her friends and social circle, along with an ambiguous portrait of her first husband, the artist Maynard Dixon.

One significant fictionalized character is Caroline Lee, a half-Chinese/half-Caucasian woman who becomes her best friend and her partner in her photography studio. Lee is based somewhat on Lange's actual assistant, a Chinese woman named Ah Lee. Ah Lee was rescued as a child by the crusading missionary Donaldina Cameron. Cameron ran an orphanage for Chinese girls who would otherwise have been sold into prostitution or worse in San Francisco's Chinatown before and after the 1906 earthquake. Cameron also makes a significant appearance in the book. 

Author Jasmin Darznik brings together fact and fiction and blends them seamlessly. In addition to this being Lange's story, it is also a homage to San Francisco and its fascinating mix of bohemians, capitalists, politicians and others, admirable and some very much not. It is a vivid trip to a city that is the favorite of many, most of whom know little of its history, but are captivated by its beauty, unique geography and today, celebrated multicultural appeal and tolerance of "alternate" lifestyles.

Writers and Artists under Fire: Red Letter Days by Sarah-Jane Stratford

The Red Scare of the 1950s destroyed or derailed the careers, personal lives and reputations of many prominent people working in publishing and entertainment. Being denounced as a Communist, or suspected of having Communist or Socialist political sympathies affected the famous, including writers Lillian Hellman, Ring Lardner, Jr. and Dalton Trumbo, and directors Martin Ritt, Lee Grant and Jules Dassin, but average working Americans, especially union members, Jews, and African-Americans who were working for change in organizations like the NAACP were caught up in the mania and arrested, jailed or called to testify before HUAC, the now-notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.

In Red Letter Days, Phoebe Adler is a young woman trying to make her way in the bohemian atmosphere of 1955 Greenwich Village. After growing up poor on Manhattan's Lower East Side, she worked in an aircraft factory during World War II, as many women did, and made her views on equal pay for women known. Phoebe's ambition was to become a writer, and she had finally achieved some minor success with scripts for the new medium of television. Then the unthinkable happened – she was blacklisted, fired from her job, branded a Red, and told to sign a loyalty oath...

Phoebe's parents had passed away and she helped support her older sister Mona who had been ill from birth with a rare disease. She lived in a facility where she was an object of medical research in exchange for her room, board and care, but Phoebe contributed money so Mona had her own room and some extras. The two were very close and Phoebe worried about Mona's gradually deteriorating health.

When Phoebe found herself jobless and in danger of arrest, she went to Mona for guidance. Mona advised her to get her things together, and buy a ticket on the first ship to London that she could. Phoebe reluctantly agreed and with her small amount of savings, and some help from her best friend Anne, she fled across the pond on the Queen Mary.

Hannah Wolfson was also a former New Yorker, living in London with her husband and two young daughters. Both were journalists, but Hannah had found a new career in TV and started a company to produce programs for ITV, the commercial competition to the BBC. 

Hannah was sympathetic and took Phoebe on as a script girl. Hiring blacklisted employees was risky, but Hannah had a number of them using assumed names. The TV show they were producing was meant for the British and American markets, so the credits could not show any blacklisted individuals. Gradually Phoebe settled into the job, and became close to Hannah, her friends and associates. Hannah invites her to call Mona each Sunday from her apartment when rates are lower – Phoebe has no phone and the calls are very expensive.

Things go well for Phoebe at first. She sells a few scripts to Hannah, and meets a charming man. While she is always fearful of being deported, she feels relatively safe in sympathetic Britain.

Hannah's program becomes a great success once it airs and her future looks bright until her husband shifts from supportive to cold. They divorce, painfully for Hannah, but the show still thrives.

Gradually, it becomes clear that neither woman is truly safe from investigation, and Phoebe is arrested by American agents...

Author Sarah-Jane Stratford has done the research and referenced real-life events and the lives of some actual individuals, constructing a compelling novel with a fast pace and plenty of tension that will keep you turning the pages till the very end. Be sure to read the Author's Note for a complete experience. 

New York, New York, circa 1958: Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

It's always fun to read a book in which you recognize places you've been... and this novel, set in 1958 Manhattan, was chock-full of scenes set in familiar restaurants and bars, some of which still survive. For a time, the lead female character, Eden Katz, even lived where I did when I first moved to the city (no, not in 1958) – the Barbizon Hotel for Women, which was located at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. The author has done a good job of capturing the nuances of Manhattan life, as it was back then and remained until around the mid-80s, when the city began to recover from its slide into the bankruptcy, crime and blackouts that marked the 70s.

The main characters are involved in the publishing world during the heart of the period that was chronicled so well in the eight seasons of Mad Men. There was not too much difference in the way that business was conducted in the big publishing houses and the leading ad agencies. Men, white Christian men, made the money and the decisions, and nearly all the women were secretaries. Jews were barely tolerated, and African-Americans hardly ever appeared in such rarified settings.

Eden Katz came to New York from Ft. Wayne, Indiana with dreams of becoming an editor. Cliff Nelson is the son of one of those very successful editors and is living a beatnik lifestyle in the Village while he tries to write but gets distracted by the temptations all around him. Miles Tillman grew up in Harlem, is a scholarship student at Columbia and a bicycle messenger, and is trying to find out more about his deceased father, a veteran of both World Wars and a member of an honored African-American troop. How these disparate people intersect is the story and it is quite the page-turner, very much in the tradition of mid-century chroniclers of New York, with a little Herman Wouk and John Cheever, and a lot of Rona Jaffe, and perhaps a few others thrown into the mix.

It kept my interest and the movie marquees started lighting up as I read. It's a good book for a rainy long weekend, a little old-fashioned yet still contemporary... since young people hoping to make it big in their chosen profession continue to come to New York. I hope they always will.

PS: one annoying anachronism that should have been caught by the editor – nobody addressed women as "Ms" in 1958. You were Miss or Mrs. and there were no other choices.