The Blowtop — Alvin Schwartz

The Blowtop was the only American novel to reveal in exquisite detail how brutally the years immediately following the horrors of World War II reshaped the gentle Bohemian art world that preceded it. Written in 1946, a year before Camus' uncannily similar "L'Etranghre," The Blowtop was not published until 1948 because of its unsparing revelations of a destructive and deadly art style. In the end, it was finally released in a mystery jacket. And soon after, The Blowtop became a cult book especially at Columbia University. In the spring of 1948 it was claimed that it sparked the "beat" movement which presumably emerged out of discussions of a new art approach among students at Columbia, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. Two years later, The Blowtop was taken up in Paris by followers of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose excitement turned it into a best seller where in 1950 it appeared under the title "Le Cingli", published by Les Editions de L'Elan. The Blowtop opens in a Sheridan Street bar in the Village with the apparently pointless killing of a small-time marijuana dealer and slowly introduces the reader to the effect of this murder on a variety of Village types, artists, writers, barflies, academics and their various loves as it gradually uncovers the sources of an art movement that was to sweep the world with names like Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Hans Hofman. The purpose of their apparently nihilistic efforts was to get at "the things that were left over"- that sense of value and spirit in the world that a war culminating in the atomic bomb had so thoroughly blasted away. It was this desperate effort to rediscover the things that matter through death, through sex, through art that challenges and enlightens the reader through every page of this revealing and powerful novel.