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

Though virtually unknown today, Maxwell "Bogie" Bodenheim (1892–1954) was considered one of the Jazz Age's most controversial and scandalous writers. Bughouse Dope is an extensive collection of his essays and articles written for publications ranging from tabloids to respected literary journals such as The Little Review, Poetry Magazine, and The Chicago Literary Times. Also included are several previously unpublished pieces left in the possession of his first wife which had been sitting in a cardboard box in her closet and passed down to her second husband after her death.

Bughouse Dope presents the writer's often radical views on literature, the arts, and 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 four of the 130 wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and often humorous pieces in this collection, carefully compiled and edited by leading Bodenheim scholar Paul Maher Jr.

Poet Allen Ginsberg wrote that Bodenheim was "just too beat," and novelist William S. Burroughs described him as "somehow lost, and I don't know why." Bodenheim was the prototypical Beat writer and Bughouse Dope is an excellent introduction for contemporary readers to this uncompromising, unconventional writer.