The Late Greats

Abstract

"The Late Greats" is a linked short story collection and part one of a novel titled "Holidays," which is set in the same world as the stories. The stories in this thesis comprise what the writer Russell Banks has called a “community tale,” detailing the intersecting lives of several members of a community of small-time musicians in Boston and Cambridge in the years leading up to the disbanding of the community and the transformation of the neighborhoods and spaces where it convened. In the novel that closes the thesis, these themes are examined with the distance of retrospect, as one of the scene’s last holdouts reckons with adulthood and comes into political awareness.