Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America

Aldrich is mentioned as associate editor of the Saturday Press.

Decades after his death, Briggs and Thomas English were named by Stoddard as Poe's "Bohemian friends."

Parry quotes Burroughs's 1862 description of Ada Clare: "She is really beautiful, not a characterless beauty, but a singular, unique beauty" (18). Parry also cites evidence of Burroughs firing back at Clare, "this caustic woman" who "ought to be sentenced to forty years' silence: 'My heart bleeds for Abbey!'" for her reviews of H.A. Abbey's book of poems, May Dreams (29).

Parry uses the example of Burroughs's "Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure" signed by "All Souls" as an example of the "fancy titles and pen names [that] added to the novel appeal of the sheet [the Saturday Press]" (24). Burroughs met Whitman through Clapp and the Saturday Press; Whitman first caught Burrough's attention when Clapp published "A Child's Reminiscence" in the Saturday Press December 24, 1859. The two men would later be introduced at Pfaff's during a meeting arranged by Clapp; "and Burroughs left completely charmed, to become one of the first apostles of the Great Loafer" (40-41).

According to Parry, Whitman admired her as "a New Woman born too soon."

Parry mentions Clemenceau as one of the visitors to Pfaff's in the late 1860s and 1870s, when the "saloon prospered commercially but not intellectually." Parry writes, "At the end of the late 'Sixties, just before he began to hate everything German, a poor, struggling French teacher, doctor, and journalist, Georges Clemenceau by name, frequented the saloon, and later the protrait of the Tiger-to-be hung in a yellow frame on the wall" (61).

English was mentioned by Stoddard as one of Poe's Bohemian friends.

Parry reprints the illustration "An Artists' Boarding-House" from Gunn's book, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses on p.23.

Herbert and North were both writers and "roving Englishmen." Herbert committed suicide shortly after North.

In discussing Poe's use of drugs, Parry writes "There was no idle interest and no empty pretension in Poe's sporadic use of drugs. He did not start it out of bravado as Fitz Hugh Ludlow and many other imitators did years later" (6).

According to Parry, after Arnold's death, Ludlow was the next to go in September, 1870. Ludlow was a native New Yorker, unlike many of the Pfaffians. According to Parry, "He was also the first Amernica art-zany to die abroad, but it was in Geneva and not on the Left Bank of the Seine that he finished his days." According to Parry, the "respectable Harpers had published his confessions of a hasheesh easter in the belief that he had cured himself of the terrible habit, but if he really did so it was only to continue with opium." Parry also writes that "His activity was the more picturesque since, like Arnold, he was the son of a clergyman, and himself once planned to take the orders. He wrote some of the best American student songs, was interested in the children's theaters, wrote many stories and verses for the young, and made a trip to the Mormon land, of which he wrote interestingly. But above all he tried to be the American De Quincey" (55).

Parry mentions that the second run of the Saturday Press ended by "introducing Mark Twain and his 'Jumping Frog' to the Atlantic coast and actually starting the snowball of his nation-wide fame" (25). Twain is also mentioned as a contributor to the Golden Era (29). Twain and Bret Harte would be made honorary members of the California Bohemian Club in 1873 (219).