ANATOLE BROYARD

Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993.

     An innocent, a provincial form the French Quarter in New Orleans and from Brooklyn, I moved in with Sheri Donatti, who was a more radical version of Anais Nin, whose protege she was. Sheri embodied all the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis. She was to be my sentimental education, I opened a bookstore, went to the New School under the GI Bill, I began to think about becoming a writer, I thought about the relation between men and women as it was in 1947, when they are still locked in what Aldous Huxley called a hostile symbiosis. In the background, like landscape, like weather, was what we read and talked about. In the foreground were our love affairs and friendships and our immersion, like swimmers or divers, in America life and art. This book is always a narrative, a story that is intimate personal, lived through, a young man excited and perplexed by life in New York City at one of the richest times in its history.

Id. at viii.