Famous Residents
From The Peopling of NYC
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Known as “Vincent,” she was a famous poet of the 1920s (first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Poetry) who symbolized the bohemianism (Free Love) and feminism (New Womanhood) of the Village, taking many lovers of both sexes and standing for the empowered woman.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay_life.htm
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/millay/ninamiller.htm
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Author of Howl and other poems, he spearheaded the Beat generation and was an outspoken anti-Vietnam and pro-gay activist, opposing conformity and championing experimentalism.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/life.htm
Bob Dylan (1941- )
He is a musician and poet who had his beginnings in the Village. He stood at the head of the folk revival of the 1960s, and his counterculture-oriented, politically charged music made him an icon.
John Sloan (1871-1951)
He was a painter in Greenwich Village and a Socialist. He was a member of the Ash Can School, a group of artists who painted pictures of everyday urban life, and art editor of The Masses, a radical socialist magazine. His art captured humdrum and typical, and he also produced work in support of the feminist movement.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTsloan.htm
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
He was a controversial French artist associated with Dada and Surrealism, and very influential on the development of Western art. He was famous for his “ready-mades,” plain objects taken out of their usual context.
http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchampbio.html
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
He was a poet influenced by Avant Garde writers, as well as the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was famous for his unconventional use of capitalization and grammar, and his social satire.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings_life.htm
Billie Holiday (1915-1959)
She was a blues singer who performed at the Village’s Café Society. She is most strongly associated with the powerful song “Strange Fruit,” about racism in the US, particularly of the lynching of black men in the South.
http://music.yahoo.com/library/default.asp?i=251457&m=bio&add=&
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
One of the most famous American poets, Poe lived in the Village for some time.
http://www.pambytes.com/poe/bio.html
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
He was the famous pamphleteer credited with inciting America to revolution. He spent the end of his life in the Village, dying there in 1809.
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
He was a famous Welsh poet and writer who gave speaking tours in the United States. He died after an alcohol overdose at the Village’s White Horse Tavern.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dthomas.htm
Maxwell Bodenheim (1891-1954)
The exemplar of Greenwich Village bohemianism, Bodenheim was a writer. He lived most of his adult life in the Village, named his memoirs My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, and was killed there with his third wife in 1954.
Max Eastman (1883-1969)
Eastman was a leftist writer living in the Village in the 1910s and ’20s. He edited The Masses until its close, and founded the similar The Liberator afterwards with his sister Crystal.
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/e/a.htm#eastman-max
Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936)
Steffens was a muckraking journalist who investigated corruption in city and state governments. A proponent of Soviet communism, he founded the radical American Magazine with journalists Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jsteffens.htm
Wouter Van Twiller (1606-1654)
The director-general of New Netherland from 1633-1638, he had a large estate (a tobacco farm) in about a third of the present-day neighborhood of Greenwich Village.
Admiral Sir Peter Warren (1703-1752)
In 1731, he married Susannah DeLancey, sister of the chief justice and lieutenant governor of New York, James DeLancey. He acquired 300 acres of Greenwich Village in 1744, paying with part of the treasure he had captured from 24 enemy French and Spanish ships. Warren returned to Britain and became an MP and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His daughter, Charlotte, married the Earl of Abingdon. The admiring city fathers named streets for him and his three daughters, but in 1794, more than a decade after the revolution, the city council changed the street names with British names. Abingdon Square survived because Charlotte and the Earl had been friendly to the patriots’ cause.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Artist famed for his "drip style," with such paintings as No. 5, 1948. His paintings have been in the center of much controversy, the least of which being whether or not they actually count as art.
Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)
He was a prominent member of the New York School of Poets, inspired by the Surrealist movement and avant-garde art.
Mabel Dodge (1879-1962)
She was a major patroness of the arts in America. Her Greenwich Village home was often frequented by writers, artists and intellectuals from the area and from elsewhere.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
She was the quintessential "rebel woman" in late 19th and early 20th century America. She was a militant feminist and model anarchist. She went to prison multiple times for anti-government, anti-policy, and liberal feminist views and actions. She was ultimately deported to Russia in 1919.
Henry James (1843-1916)
He was a writer and, more importantly, a literary critic. One of his major works, written in 1880, is called "Washington Square."
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
He was one of the most renowned and acclaimed American playwrights, distinctive because of the realism he employed in his works. Some of his famous writings are "The Iceman Cometh" and "The Long Voyage Home."
John Reed (1887-1920)
He was an important journalist who covered the revolutions of his day: labor unionization, the Mexican Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. An avowed communist, he was stranded in Russia and died there in 1920. He is the only American buried in Red Square's Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
She was a birth control activist who opened the first family planning clinics. She was also a vocal free speech activist, and was imprisoned on multiple occasions for her socialist and feminist activism.
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
He was a writer and literary critic who wrote and edited for such publications as the New Yorker and the New Republic. He was a vocal critic of US Cold War policy; he was also against the Vietnam War.