house, and an automobile. Although I have worked in factories
of various kinds, have shipped out to sea, and have been asso-
ciated with radical movements, I consider myself basically
middle-class in temper and outlook. Like most Americans, I
am of the city but not for it, for the countryside but not of it
(despite the fact that I live in it in preference to the city). Cer-
tain segments of American society are as foreign to me as the
warring Congolese tribes: the very rich, the migrant workers,
café society. If I have not written of them it has not been be-
cause I lacked curiosity, but rather because the opportunity to
learn about them has not come my way any more than it has
come the way of most middle-class Americans. My own Buffalo
boyhood and predominantly white-collar adulthood have been
for the most part as typical as my experiences in World War II,
which I got through, like the majority of my generation, with-
out shooting at anyone or being specifically shot at. But I saw
ships go up around me, houses disappear, children die, all in
that impersonal mechanics of destruction which we have been
learning so well in this century, and it was in that war that I,
like many others, really learned the meaning of boredom and
of fear.

3. I am a Jew. My claim that this is another element of my
typicality in mid-century America should not be taken as
whimsicality. In my grandparents" time, at the beginning of
this century, the Jew was thought of as two kinds of person,
each of them "un-American" if not "anti-American": first, as a
mysterious and frightening money-changer, akin to the Wall
Street titans but not of them; second, as a clannish, poverty-
stricken, crime-ridden, disease-infected, unassimilable foreign
element (the magazines of the period included solemn discus-
sions of whether, since there were so many Jewish pimps, pro-
curers, muggers, and pickpockets, there was not something in-
herently criminal in the Jewish character). Now, little more
than half a century later, not only would such formulations be
unthinkable (except in the hate sheets); not only has the Jew
been replaced by the Negro and then by the Puerto Rican as
bottom dog and supposedly congenital criminal; but the Jew-
ish workingman has all but disappeared, and the suburban Jew
has emerged in his place as the middle-class man par excel-
lence, in a country that prides itself on being solidly middle-
class.

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