As a neighborhood, the Greenwich Village / West Village area has played an outsize role in American art, culture and politics. Throughout the 20th century artists, poets, musicians and writers have nurtured their talents in the neighborhood's boarding houses, tenements and bars, giving birth to new artistic genres and political movements. The list of influential Americans associated with Greenwich Village and the West Village is long: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, E.E. Cummings, Eugene O'Neill, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, to name just a few.