The novelist Michael Cunningham has described Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, as “the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children. It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into.”
This idiosyncratic bohemia has attracted the likes of Edward Hopper, Eugene O’Neill, Mark Rothko and Tennessee Williams along with poets, dropouts, drag queens and drifters. In the summer of 1975 came a lanky, restless 19-year-old from New Jersey with no job and no money, sleeping on the floor of a shared cottage while his roommates worked to pay the rent. His name was Anthony Bourdain, who would later become a celebrity chef, author and television globetrotter.
