Up Stream; An American Chronicle - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... new warmth and sympathy and compassion--all that seemed terribly far away and almost blotted out here. Thus an acute peacelessness stirred always at the core of me. At all events, when a friend in the department was called to the chairmanship of the department in Central City and asked me to go with him, I accepted the offer, though not without doubt and hesitation. Mary and I raised money somehow, went for a few brief weeks to Queenshaven and came to Central City to establish ourselves. That establishment was slow and difficult and never complete. We had both been accustomed to richer and racier forms of life than we found in that characteristic city of the Middle West, to a more flexible society, a freer air. But we were destined to stay there for six years. It was there that I watched the color of life and brooded upon death and war and felt the pang of youth leaving my heart; there I wrote several books that brought me some small repute and sat in final judgment on my poetry. There, too, I thought at one time that I had learned the lesson of resignation.... I applied myself to the business of education. To what we, in America, call the higher education of the most democratic type. For the university of Central City is a state institution. It is coeducational. There are between five and six thousand students and a faculty of nearly five hundred. The university is divided into eight chief colleges to all but one of which--the college of medicine--a graduation certificate from a high school admits the student. In a word, any hoy or girl in the state who has completed a high school course may go to Central City and learn anything within the whole realm of human knowledge which may seem most effective in developing the individual. These...

Ludwig Lewisohn (1883-1955) was an outstanding twentieth-century American Jewish writer.