The United States Particularly Abandoned Liberia After

A Couple Of Years I Taught In Graduate Programs At Nyu And Columbia, In The Early Eighties.

We Are Not Buried In History, But Surrounded By It. You Can't Avoid Our Behavior Being Shaped By It, To A Considerable Degree. We Have This Fantasy That We Are Free Of History. This Allows Us Not To See The Circumstances, The Historical Circumstances Of Other People.

And Out Of A Desire Essentially To Imitate What I Was Reading, I Began To Write, Like A Clever Monkey.

The 60s Passed And Faded And I Grew Older, And In 1987 Bought A House In Upstate New York, And It Turned Out That John Brown Was Buried Down The Road From My House And That He Had Lived There Longer Than Anywhere Else And His House Was Still Standing.

My Major Allegiance Has Been To Storytelling, Not To History.