Cape Cod Sea Camps, the summer camp I attended for several years in the late 1970s, recently shut its doors after 99 years, a family decision taken amid the pandemic. One of the camp field trips, back in my day, was a visit to “P-town,” as it was referred to, at the very end of the curved arm that is Cape Cod. My 11-year-old eyes saw it as a honky-tonk paradise of taffy and T-shirt stores. In later years I came to understand that Provincetown, along with Truro and Wellfleet beside it, formed a summer redoubt of artists, writers, psychoanalysts, and architects.
The “Cape Cod story” that John Taylor Williams tells in The Shores of Bohemia is a social history of the American creative class in the first half of the 20th century, a good portion of whose members, at least those based in New York City’s Greenwich Village, passed through the far reaches of the peninsula.
