Book Rec of the Day 1/20/2007

THE LITERARY LIFE

The house at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, was for one brief, shining moment, a literary Camelot. A group of creative geniuses produced some of their best work in the house. McCullers wrote The Member of the Wedding and Ballad of the Sad Café. Gypsy Rose Lee wrote The G-String Murders. Britten and Auden collaborated on the opera Paul Bunyan. A hotbed of talent simmered on the eve of World War II, when the world was about to change. Tippins’s book is a quirky, ingenious look at one of the strangest communes ever.

FEBRUARY HOUSE: THE STORY OF W. H. AUDEN, CARSON MCCULLERS, JANE AND PAUL BOWLES, BENJAMIN BRITTEN, AND GYPSY ROSE LEE, UNDER ONE ROOF IN WARTIME AMERICA, by Sherill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)