Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.
Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.
I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary.
I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.
I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.
After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.
I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.