ABSTRACT
For many people, the encounter with Caldwell, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and even with their forerunner Lewis, made the first little hole in the wall to freedom, the first suspicion that not everything in the world's culture ended with the fasces. For several years the young people read, translated, and wrote, with a joy of discovery and of revolt that infuriated the official culture; but the success was so great that it constrained the regime to tolerate it, in order to save face. This chapter explores that many countries in Europe, and in the rest of the world, are today the laboratory where forms and styles are being created, and that nothing prevents those of goodwill, though they live in an old convent, from speaking a new word. It suggests that American culture has lost its mastery, its innocent and knowing intensity that put it in the vanguard of intellectual world.
