Survival Years
Here are some things to think on, taken from an anthology called The Survival Years. These are stories from writers in the generation that Tom Brokaw later called "the greatest generation," many years after the fact. Here is the tipping point between peace and war.
Irwin Shaw, page 42
"I don't want to write any more books. An honest book is a criticism. Why should I torture myself into criticizing this poor, corrupt, frantic, tortured, agony-stricken world?"
Kay Boyle, page 49
"You could write things about what you believed, or dream things about it, and there lay the ideal so pure and remote in you that you deceive yourself into thinking that it would survive alone. But it can't survive alone, and for a long time you can't find the act to give it for survival. But now suddenly it's happened," he said. "It happened to me the way it happened to everybody else standing up there having a drink in uniform - we were suddenly given the outer trappings for the things in which we had believed. It's something like kneeling down and being knighted," he said...
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