ABSTRACT
Norman Maclean, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, had a great reputation as a teacher but had published very little. Professors are aging adolescents, who have never left school, whose lives have been defined by the receiving and giving of grades. As students, they want to be recognized as the brightest, and as teachers and scholars they tend to regard their colleagues as competitors, envious of the rewards a colleague might receive. There were students with strong political commitments against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights. The countercultural revolution of the sixties failed to transform American politics, which became increasingly conservative. A censorious or disapproving response only reveals the critic to be uptight, the insinuation being that American puritanism, with its repressiveness and hypocrisy, is somehow implicated in the self-righteousness of American foreign policy. There may be American Jews who absurdly compare their suffering to that of the blacks in America.
