Judith R. Halasz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

This book analyzes bohemians' often overlooked relationship to work using historical and ethnographic research on Paris and downtown New York. Halasz argues that bohemians' unconventional behaviors and attitudes towards employment and the broader work world constitute a politically charged yet increasingly precarious form of cultural resistance to hegemonic imperatives.

1. Introduction 2. The Parisian Prototype: 19th-Century Bohemia 3. The Beats: Political Poetics 4. The 1960s: A Generation in Revolt 5. The Underground 6. Get Back to Work: The Demise of the Underground 7. On the Margins of the Workaday World: Productivity, the Work Ethic, and Bohemian Self-Determination 8. Epilogue to a Scene: The Current Situation