Works

The Vault at Pfaff's contains an expanding bibliograpy of works by and about the bohemians of antebellum New York, including both nineteenth-century sources and relevant scholarship from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When available, digital versions of these works are provided either in a CONTENTdm viewer or through an external link to a source elsewhere on the Internet. Metadata and brief abstracts of these works are searchable; browsable lists of  books, periodicals, manuscripts, works of art, and theatrical productions are also available.

The majority of the content available on this site comes from the The New York Saturday Press, Vanity Fair, and The New York Leader—short-lived but influential periodicals that many of the antebellum bohemians contributed to—as well as from the diaries of Thomas Butler Gunn. All of this content is available in a CONTENTdm viewer on this site. The site also hosts biographies of Ada Clare (by Gloria Rudman Goldblatt) and Anna Mary Freedman (by Shauna Martineau Robertson); and a history of Charles Pfaff's restaurant and lager beer saloon written by Stephanie M. Blalock and published in collaboration with Lehigh University Press.

Click here to search the metadata and abstracts for these works, or follow the "Search" link in the menu above.

Click here to learn more about the creators of these works, or follow the "People" link in the menu above. 

The image on this page is from the March 17, 1860 issue of Vanity Fair. It depicts Walt Whitman putting his hat over a comically small Fitz-James O'Brien, with both of them sheltered by an overgrown leaf of grass (or calamus plant). The accompanying poem, "Counter-Jumps. A Poemettina.—After Walt Whitman," is by O'Brien, and was part of a larger effort by Vanity Fair to promote Whitman's poetry around the time of the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass.