Intended as a group biography, Mr. Williams’s book is at times more 'group' than 'biography,' its pages popping with the names of the well-known and forgotten, from the free spirits of the first generation to the variously hued leftists and ex-leftists of the 1930s and ’40s to the academically employed sunseekers of the 1960s.

... atmospheric, gossipy.

Nearly all seem to have been graduates of Ivy League schools. But their passion and urgency for social justice is vividly evoked in Williams’s book.

As a comprehensive guide to every family and famous person who lived on the Outer Cape in the first half of the last century, their friendships, love affairs and lineages, the book is invaluable. But it’s also extremely dense, an over-floured chowder so packed with 50 years of names, names and more names that some paragraphs read like a telephone book. It’s partly a function of the book’s thoroughness, but it makes it hard reading — even for someone like me who has now spent 26 consecutive summers in exactly this part of the world, for many of the same reasons these men and women once did. But Williams does cite the prose of many of his subjects to convey the magic of the place..

A poignant chapter profiling the children of this milieu reveals the harsher side of gifted but often neglectful parents who lived primarily for art and alcohol. Erudite and evocative, this is an indelible snapshot of a time and place that inspired significant creative achievement..

... a generous, commodious portrait of the communities of artists and writers who flourished on the Cape from 1910 to 1960.