La Vie Boheme!: The Novel That Inspired RENT

The original novel that inspired the Broadway musical RENT! At last, a readable, accessible, new edition of this wild comic novel, especially for Rent fans!Scènes de la vie de Bohème didn’t begin life as a musical, or an opera, or even as a novel. Writer Henri Murger was an authentic, twenty-something Bohemian (i.e., starving artsy) in the Latin Quarter neighborhood of Paris in the 1840s. He originally wrote these stories as a newspaper serialization. But after the huge success of a stage adaptation, the stories were collected and published as a full novel, which is how they’ve come down to us, now more than a hundred and seventy years later. And they’re still funny!At the crossroads of the Romantic movement and the Realism movement, Murger managed to walk a tightrope between them, his stories realistic and cynical enough for the critics and academics, but romantic and funny enough for the average reading public.Murger didn’t invent the world of alternative, unconventional, iconoclastic, artsy “Bohemia,” a world of starving artists and unpaid rent, a world of “art for art’s sake.” But he was the first to write a novel about this community and these people, based on his own experience as one of them. Murger died suddenly at the age of 39.A century and a half later, Jonathan Larson would follow an incredibly parallel life path, writing about his community, and then dying suddenly at the age of (almost) 36, leaving us Rent. As crazy and wild as Murger’s and Larson’s stories are, they are sketches of real life and real people. These things really happened and these characters actually existed. And thanks to Murger, we’ll never forget them.

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