"MLA convention at the Americana. A bunch of over-age SDS's broke up the American literature meetings repeatedly with utterly phony, trumped-up charges of police terror. How these guys like the atmosphere of confrontation. I'll not soon forget the line of young instructors forming before the stage while old, gray, bald Henry Nash Smith made his weak remarks. Pour la reste, I listened to Dick Poirer reading the bad, new critical prose over the question of Chicago and thought, what a phony.
"This was a wholly provoked incident, based on a few posters in a hotel lobby, and leading to deliriously self-righteous rant on the part of Lauter and his wife Florence Howe and the others. I watched all this with the greatest contempt. My soul cannot live on this pseudo-revolutionary fare."
~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook
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