ABSTRACT
I never wanted to be a historian. Not in high school, where I fell in love with Thomas Wolfe and wanted to write novels full of the mournful sound of railroad horns in the great and lonely American night. Not in college where, as a lit major, my passion shifted to the writers of the Lost Generation, and especially Hemingway, who was always facing danger, at the front lines, in jungles or the bullring, calmly reporting on wars and death in the afternoon. Not in the first year of grad school, when I took a Master’s Degree in journalism to prepare myself for a life as world traveler, reporter, novelist, lover, and witness to or participant in wars and revolutions.
