ABSTRACT
IN the winter of 1949–1950, my first trip to Europe was the pilgrimage that every American writer and editor does at least once in his life. Unlike earlier generations, who went abroad either as a form of exile or to renew their creative energies, and later ones, who went back and forth with the mobility provided by the boom in the tourist industry and the new affluence for writers and academics—unlike those who came before and after our generation, most of us had been homebodies. We were literally a depression generation, which meant not only that we did not have the money to hop over to Paris or London but that our sights were limited to our own territorial limits, not too far from New York. (Nor did we get a trip to Europe as a graduation present.) It was also before the great academic migrations to universities across the country, which created the cultural equivalent of agoraphobia. There was a striking contrast between our preoccupation with nothing less than the most global problems and our actual intellectual provinciality. New York acquired the qualities of a nation: it was not only the homeland; it took the place of the rest of the world.
