Bughouse Dope: Selected Essays & Articles
Maxwell Bodenheim
Edited and with an introduction by Paul Maher Jr.
April 2, 2024
ISBN 9798218371913 / Paperback / 424 pages / $24.99

Though virtually unknown today, Maxwell "Bogie" Bodenheim (1892–1954) was once one of the Jazz Age's most controversial and scandalous literary figures. Bughouse Dope is an extensive collection of his essays and articles originally published everywhere from sensationalist tabloids to respected literary journals such as The Little Review, Poetry Magazine, and The Chicago Literary Times. Also included are several previously unpublished pieces that remained in the possession of his first wife—stored for decades in a cardboard box in her closet and eventually passed down to her second husband.

In these 130 essays, Bodenheim expresses his often radical and always arresting views on literature, the arts, and contemporary social issues. "Poets, Poets Everywhere & Hardly a Line to Read," "Should Sex Dominate Modern Literature?," "The Relation of Economics to Poetry," and "Psychoanalysis and American Fiction" are just a few of the provocative and frequently humorous works gathered here, meticulously compiled and edited by leading Bodenheim scholar Paul Maher Jr.

Allen Ginsberg once remarked that Bodenheim was "just too beat," while William S. Burroughs described him as "somehow lost, and I don't know why." A prototypical Beat writer long before the Beats, Bodenheim defied convention in both life and art. Bughouse Dope offers today's readers an indispensable introduction to this uncompromising, visionary, and unjustly underrecognized American original.