Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Publishers Weekly, 6/30/14
“An engaging history of a literary underground…Though Walt Whitman is the best-known of the group, readers may find themselves drawn to his lesser-known comrades…Martin's writing rises to the occasion…A worthwhile read…Introduces armchair literary historians to a dazzling cast of eccentrics.”

Booklist, starred review, 8/1/14
“This is popular history the way it should be, well-researched and authoritative yet demotic in idiom and unpretentious in presentation, a darn good read.”

Wall Street Journal, 9/6/14
“Elaine's, the Algonquin Hotel, the White Horse and Cedar taverns: These and a few other Manhattan establishments have become legendary as places for writers and artists…On the evidence of Justin Martin's Rebel Souls, the long-defunct watering hole Pfaff's deserves similar fame…[Martin] is a fluent, companionable writer, and he manages to weave his many biographical strands into an engaging narrative—no mean feat…The experience of reading Rebel Souls is a bit like hovering on the sidewalk near the entrance to Pfaff's, listening to the sounds of jollity and vehemence wash up from the basement below. Mr. Martin does a fine job of making us feel that we're back on antebellum Broadway.”

EDGE, 8/29/14
“Martin's sharp and elegiac prose follows the lives of the Bohemians, many who meet tragic ends. Their stories are grandly entertaining to read, and Martin rescues a large chunk of our cultural history.”

The ARTery, 9/4/14
“It’s rare for a book to conjure the feeling of being in a bar with one’s rowdiest and most interesting friends. Rebel Souls…does just that, highlighting a group of daring individualists who helped shape American culture…Martin gives us a different side of Whitman: A struggling poet trying to find his place both in the world and among a coterie of noisy fellow travelers. These fellow artists were some of the most interesting characters to haunt American letters and stages in the days just before, during and just after the war…In Rebel Souls, Justin Martin renders those times, these bold Americans and the places they strode with telling detail. It’s a story about the risks and rewards of being an original and the far-reaching effects this can have.”

New York Press, 9/9/14
“Martin takes us into the scintillating world of Pfaff’s saloon in the 19th century…What happened in Pfaff’s saloon in the 1850s is stuff of literary legend…The Greenwich Village saloon was finally paid the homage it deserves with the release of Rebel Souls.”

Los Angeles Review of Books, 9/11/14
“[A] compelling, insightful group biography…Vividly describes not only Pfaff’s heyday, but also how Clapp’s coterie, once it was dispersed by the chaos, duties, and opportunities brought by the Civil War, came to define an unmistakably American species of rebel artist…Martin sets himself an ambitious task, and rises to it in the structure and reach of his telling. In 1860, the war scatters his protagonists, whose fates he follows for the latter two-thirds of Rebel Souls like a literary LoJack...Martin’s done a remarkable job bringing ‘those times, that place’ very much alive through his painstaking research…Pfaff’s rebel souls, Martin makes plain, are all around us.”

Roanoke Times, 9/11/14
“Rebel Souls is at once a recreation of New York during the mid-19th century and a group biography of people who changed the way Americans viewed art, politics and themselves…A muralesque portrait of a group of intentional misfits who would, in the middle of the 19th century, help transform American literature, theater and journalism and forever alter the way we look at ourselves and our society.”

Brain Pickings, 9/16/14
“Shed[s] light on the untold story of the Pfaff’s set and its ample reverberations through the last 150 years of creative culture…Rebel Souls is an enormously absorbing read in its entirety, exploring the blossoming of Whitman’s literary legacy, the tantalizing group of artists, writers, and performers who populated Pfaff’s and influenced one another, and how they made their way West to meet Mark Twain’s Bohemians of Silicon Valley.”

Washington Post, 9/21/14
“Rife with...scintillating anecdotes...This period in Whitman’s development is often skated over in biographies of the Good Gray Poet, and Martin has done us a favor by bringing it, along with a host of other artistic connections, amusingly and indelibly back to life."

Boston Globe, 9/21/14
“Whitman now is a central figure in the American canon, but his Pfaff’s pals are all but forgotten. In Rebel Souls, biographer Justin Martin brings them wonderfully to life in his enjoyable romp through the milieu. Whitman is the emotional core of the book — Martin’s passages on Whitman’s romantic travails and his experiences tending to wounded soldiers during the Civil War are unforgettably moving. But the other members of the Pfaff’s coterie almost steal the show.”

Cape Cod Times, 9/14/14
“The book is a veritable who’s who of the 19th-century’s movers and shakers.”

New York Journal of Books, 9/18/14
“Martin’s historical scope and elegiac prose, laced through with parlance of the period, is not only grandly entertaining to read, it rescues this bit of cultural history and gives Whitman a more human dimension past the iconic image.”

InfoDad, 9/18/14
“Enthusiasts for the byways of American history will enjoy Justin Martin’s exploration of the crowd that used to hang out at Pfaff’s Saloon in New York City—an establishment that was the first gathering place of Bohemian-style thinkers and possibly the young nation’s first gay bar…Martin writes about Pfaff’s and its coterie with skill and attentiveness.”

Hudson Valley News, 9/17/14
“Anyone who loves history, and particularly literary history, will want to read this book.”

Waterbury Republican-American, 9/21/14
“Fascinating and eye-opening.”

Neworld Review, September 2014
“A highly informative look at the very first attempt here in America where novelists, poets, actors, dancers, visual artists and journalists, came together and tried to create a society…Martin does an excellent job in Rebel Souls, in drawing insightful portraits of some of the main characters like Whitman, which is the heart of his book.”

Reviews by Amos Lassen, 9/19/14
“Written in prose that pulls us in with the first sentence and keeps us until the last sentence when we are left wanting even more.”

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