In Translation

Cómo me convertí en Hettie Jones

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

"A feminist scrutiny such as this is just what those last decades needed, as the beats themselves needed it."-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Hettie Jones has written a rare and valuable book, a personal story that works equally as history. Her memoir is the memoir of an important and historic milieu; it's probably the best account yet written of what it was like to be at the center of New York Bohemianism in the 1950s and 1960s. Her honesty and forgiveness and the clarity of her writing are exemplary and moving."-Russell Banks

"This is a story every American ought to read, written by someone who is generous and loving. The writing is easy, effortless, honest, like a letter from a friend, but this artful book is full of history."
-Jamaica Kincaid