The Native’s Return. E-book. Formato EPUB - 9791222003191

The Native’s Return. E-book. Formato EPUB. &ldquo;Early in the spring of 1932, when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship requiring me to go to Europe for a year, I was thirty-three and had been in the United States nineteen years. At fourteen&mdash;a son of peasants, with a touch of formal &ldquo;city education&rdquo;&mdash;I had emigrated to the United States from Carniola, then a tiny Slovene province of Austria, now an even tinier part of a <i>banovina</i> in the new Yugoslav state.<br />In those nineteen years I had become an American; indeed, I had often thought I was more American than were most of the native citizens of my acquaintance. I was ceaselessly, almost fanatically, interested in the American scene; in ideas and forces operating in America&rsquo;s national life, in movements, tendencies and personalities, in technical advances, in social, economic, and political problems, and generally in the tremendous drama of the New World.<br />Events and things outside of America interested me but incidentally: only in so far as they were related to, or as they affected, the United States. I spoke, wrote, and read only in English. For sixteen years I had had practically no close contact with immigrants of my native nationality. For three years I had been a soldier in the American army. After the war I had roamed over a good half of the United States and had been to Hawaii, Philippines, Central and South America. In the last few years I had become an American writer, writing on American subjects for American readers. And I had married an American girl.<br />To Stella I had told but a few main facts about my childhood and early boyhood in the old country; and what little I had told her of my parents, and the village and house in which I was born, had seemed to her &ldquo;like a story.&rdquo; She scarcely believed me. To her I was an American from toes to scalp.<br />Now, because of my Guggenheim Fellowship, we were going to Europe.&rdquo;