Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel - Tapa dura

'It's where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, Arthur Miller hid from Marilyn Monroe and Sid killed Nancy. A new book lifts the lid on the Chelsea hotel, where scandal lurked behind every door' Mail on Sunday

'Tippins leads us on a vivid, informed and entertaining ramble through the history of New York's nonconformist and artistic classes: from political malcontents, the literary avant-garde and the countercultural upheavals of the fifties and sixties. There are six degrees of separation that connect Mark Twain to Abbie Hoffman, Arthur Miller to Andy Warhol' Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph

'Though Tippins has a hearty appetite for gossip, she underpins the life of the Chelsea with the social history of its times. The hotel's fortunes rose and fell with the economy of the city and her salty stories of hope, heroin, heartbreak and heroism revive the Chelsea's heartbeat' The Times

'An unputdownable eulogy to 23rd Street's infamous Chelsea Hotel'

'Not just a biography of a building, it amounts to an alternative history of 20th-century culture' --The Spectator

The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House,delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists' community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palaceis the intimate and definitive story.