Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York
by: Alice T. Friedman

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original pictorial boards (in publisher's unopened shrinkwrap). 280 pages illustrated in b&w and color. Alice Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903-1934), a young musician, photographer, and man-about-town who, although virtually unknown today, moved in extraordinary circles. Among his friends and acquaintances, he listed Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, Muriel Draper, Romaine Brooks, Tallulah Bankhead. In his photographs and letters, we meet the rising stars of modern art, music, dance, and literature and enter a world of interracial friendship, "queer space," and experimentation that shone brightly before being swept away by the Depression.