ABSTRACT
AS a participant in many of the literary and political events now being disputed, I have thought for some time of adding my own account of what happened in those fateful decades to the so-called historical record. But I have held back until now because of some doubts about the general meaning of my own experiences—doubts that might be described more technically as methodological scruples. At first, I wondered how typical my experience was. In the thirties, my literary and political world certainly seemed marginal to what was popularly thought to be the mainstream. We were not only young; we thought of ourselves as alienated, against the grain, radical, outside the system. And though our arrogance led us to believe we were intelligent, gifted, and superior to our elders, it never occurred to me that our history would some day be considered important. In fact, as I look back, it seems to me we underestimated each other. For all our vanity, our self-confidence, we felt like pygmies in comparison with not only the literary and intellectual figures of the more distant past, but with those who came just before us.
