![Illustration by Pierluigi Longo](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HARPERS_0321_26_02-900x0-c-default.png)
Illustration by Pierluigi Longo
EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959).
CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare.
Under one arm, he’s carrying books. In his other hand, a copy of The Village Voice.
He walks quickly, past men in coats and hats, women with scarves over their heads pushing collapsible shopping carts, couples holding hands, and poets and hustlers and musicians and winos, past drugstores, liquor stores, delis, apartment buildings.
But the young man is zeroed in on one thing: the marquee of the Art Theatre, which is…