Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga, #1)

by James Lee Burke

My generational vanity was not of an arrogant kind. I didn’t mean that at all. Our vanity had its origins not only in our youth but in our collective innocence. We told ourselves we had prevailed during the Great Depression because we had kept faith with Jeffersonian democracy and had not given ourselves over to the Reds or the American equivalent of fascism. The truth about us was a little more humble in nature: We were born and raised in a transitional era; we were the last Americans who would remember a nation that was more agrarian than industrial, with more dirt roads than paved highways. We would also be the last generation to believe in the moral solvency of the Republic. This is not meant to be a dour evaluation of what we were or the era when we lived. In many ways, it was a grand time to be around. The cultural anchors of the continent were Hollywood on one end and Ebbets Field on the other. The literary staple of almost every middle-income American home was The Saturday Evening Post, which contained the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and John O’Hara. A cherry Coke at the drugstore cost a dime, the music was a nickel, and the dance floor was free. For most of us, each sunrise was like a pink rose opening on the earth’s rim. Perhaps we created a myth and became acolytes in the service of our own creation; but if that was the case, the entire world was envious of us all the same. Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considere...