“Early in the spring of 1932, when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship requiring me to go to Europe for a year, I was thirty-three and had been in the United States nineteen years. At fourteen—a son of peasants, with a touch of formal “city education”—I had emigrated to the United States from Carniola, then a tiny Slovene province of Austria, now an even tinier part of a banovina in the new Yugoslav state.
In those nineteen years I had become an American; indeed, I had often thought I was more American than were most of the native citizens of my acquaintance. I was ceaselessly, almost fanatically, interested in the American scene; in ideas and forces operating in America’s national life, in movements, tendencies and personalities, in technical advances, in social, economic, and political problems, and generally in the tremendous drama of the New World.
Events and things outside of America interested me but incidentally: only in so far as they were related to, or as they affected, the United States. I spoke, wrote, and read only in English. For sixteen years I had had practically no close contact with immigrants of my native nationality. For three years I had been a soldier in the American army. After the war I had roamed over a good half of the United States and had been to Hawaii, Philippines, Central and South America. In the last few years I had become an American writer, writing on American subjects for American readers. And I had married an American girl.
To Stella I had told but a few main facts about my childhood and early boyhood in the old country; and what little I had told her of my parents, and the village and house in which I was born, had seemed to her “like a story.” She scarcely believed me. To her I was an American from toes to scalp.
Now, because of my Guggenheim Fellowship, we were going to Europe.”