Since the early 19th century, the bohemian has been the protagonist of the story the West has wanted to hear about its artists - a story of genius, glamour, and doom. This book analyzes the many shifting meanings that constitute bohemia and the bohemian. With a huge cast of real-life characters, from Chatterton to Jackson Pollock to Augustus John, she explores the bohemians eccentric use of dress, the role of sex and erotic love, the quest for excess, and their intransigent politics. She demonstrates how, rather than disappearing from Western culture, bohemia is at the core of the most heated cultural debates at the end of the second millennium.