Eden as Eldorado, part one

Prologue: You can't teach American Literature for thirty years and not think about the meaning of the American Dream. Everybody has a variant of AD of course: Mine centers around my maternal grandparents who emigrated from Ireland in the 1880's and settled in Michigan where Edward became a lumberman in the state's virgin pine forests--and succeeded well enough to put his eight children through college.

My mother May was the last of the eight and taught middle school in Hamtramck, Michigan. After two years as an aviation radar technician in the US Navy, I studied philosophy on the G.I.Bill at the University of Detroit and then worked for a Ph.D. in American Civilization at Western Reserve University.

My resume includes a Ford Foundation fellowship in New York City on learning how to use the new medium of TV in the English classroom, six years as radio-TV editor for Scholastic Teacher, trying out those new ideas; a Carnegie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to create a new course on "The Mass Society" for their department of American Civilization; writing the first curriculum for the founding of Penn's Annenberg School of Communication; serving as the first director of the Institute of American Studies at the University of Hawaii; advising Time-Life Films for four years on what BBC TV they should distribute in the United States; writing a weekly column for ten years in an alternative paper in Philadelphia; and spending the last 20 years deparochializing my Americanist slant by traveling and studying in Africa, Asia and Europe.

If following your impulses to grow is fulfilling the American Dream, then I've been a successful dreamer.