Peace Corps Worldwide

Writing from experience Anyone who has read Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, or John Dos Passos can see how they used the experience of living in France, England, and Spain as subject matter. In much the same way, Paul Theroux, Moritz Thomsen, Maria Thomas, Eileen Drew, Richard Wiley, P.F. Kluge, Bob Shacochis, Norm Rush, Marnie Mueller, Peter Hessler, George Packer, Kathleen Coskran, Mark Brazaitis, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Eileen Drew, Chris Conlon, Sandra Meek, Tom Hazuka, Jeanne D’Haem, Joseph Monninger, Leonard Levitt, Margaret Szumowski, Ann Neelon, Roland Merullo, Charles Larson, Susan Rich, Mike Tidwell, Susanna Herrera, Peter Chilson, Geraldine Kennedy, Rob Davidson, and hundreds of other Peace Corps writers have used Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in their short stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction. While writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, they have broadened the landscape of American . . .

P.F. Kluge, the Writer in Residence at Kenyon College, author of the novel Eddie and The Cruisers, Biggest Elvis, and, most recently, Gone Tomorrow, as well as having two films based on his work, Dog Day Afternoon and Eddie And The  Cruisers, has a novel coming out this September from Overlook Press. This novel is set in the 1980’s and follows the life of  Hans Greifinger, a German-American who immigrated to the United States in 1928 and settled in New York and New Jersey. It is a story of him and his son, a nationally-syndicated travel writer. Askold Melnyczuk writes of the book, “Kluge knows his characters from the inside and his comic, loving portrayals stand with the best of Russo and Irving. Jersey has never seemed more exotic. Kluge entertains while provoking all the big questions about the meaning of origins and the search for home.”

A New Frontier Kennedy’s call to serve and his campaign theme of a “new frontier” appealed to the romantic impulse of many Volunteers. While social historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that our frontier was closed by the 1890s, America still responded to a hero, a lone hero against a corrupt world. This lone hero was dramatized during the 1950s in two classic western movies, “Shane” and “High Noon.” And like Alan Ladd in “Shane,” Peace Corps Volunteers still ride off into the sunset, saddlebags packed with idealism and a yearning for adventure, and the writers among them seek new experiences to write home about. An edge and an itch In my years of watching people join the Peace Corps, I have found that the most obvious PCV candidates are those who have an edge about them. They want more – whatever the more is – and are not satisfied with . . .

The Ugly Peace Corps Volunteer Then in 1958 came The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene J. Burdick. This book went through fifty-five printings in two years and was a direct motivation in creating the Peace Corps, as Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman points out in her history of the Peace Corps, All You Need Is Love. In a “Factual Epilogue” to the novel, Lederer and Burdick lay out the basic philosophy and modus operandi of what would later be the Peace Corps. Writing about how America should “help” developing countries, the authors declare: We do not need the horde of 1,500,000 Americans – mostly amateurs – who are now working for the United States overseas. What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working, and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and – in some cases – their health. They must go equipped to . . .

The Kennedy Kids in the Age of The Organization Man During the 1950s, two impulses swept across the United States. One impulse that characterized the decade was detailed in two best-selling books of the times: the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the non-fiction The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books looked at the “American way of life” and how men got ahead on the job and in society. Both are bleak looks at the corporate world. These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s philosophy as expressed in such novels as Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Her philosophy of Objectivism proposed reason as man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. Every man, according to Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to . . .

Farang (Poems) by Peter Blair (Thailand 1975–78) Autumn House Press $14.95 65 pages 2009 • The Verse of the Sword by RJ Huddy (Morocco 1981–83) xpatfiction $17.50 456 pages September 2009 • The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich (Niger 1984–86) White Pine Press $16.00 96 pages May 1, 2010 • A Peace Corps Memoir: Answering JFK’s Call by Terry Sack (Bolivia 1963–65) Createspace $15.95 458 pages April 2010 • Click on the book covers or the bold book titles to order from Amazon and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.

More significant than similarities with the Lost Generation is an examination of why writers went overseas in the first place, and how they wrote about their expatriate world. It is generally accepted that many members of the Lost Generation rebelled against what America had become by the 1900s: a business-oriented society where money and a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant work ethic dominated the culture. To these writers, America was not a “success story.” It was a country devoid of a cosmopolitan culture. Following World War I, a segment of American writers sought to escape that rigid style of life and literature. Europe promised them a way out. Lost Generation writers wanted to be apart from America in terms of what they wrote, how they wrote, and where they wrote. These disenfranchised artists packed their bags and traveled to London and Paris in search of literary freedom and a more diverse way . . .

Peace Corps writers are like their predecessors in Paris in four ways. 1) Both groups wrote about, and explained to an American audience, the world of an expatriate. Hemingway wrote of Paris and Spain while Mark Brazaitis writes of Guatemala; Hemingway wrote of big game hunting in East Africa and Norm Rush writes of white racists in Southern Africa; Fitzgerald wrote of wealthy, bored Americans on the French Riviera and Simone Zelitch writes of survivors of the Holocaust leaving Hungary for Haifa. Other Peace Corps writers regularly find equally rewarding subject matter. Paul Theroux writes of Indians in Kenya in his first novel set in Africa; Richard Wiley about Korea and Koreans; P. F. Kluge about islands in the sun in the Pacific; and Mark Jacobs, who was a Volunteer in Paraguay and a foreign service officer in his Peace Corps country as well as Turkey and Spain, has written about . . .

In the 1920s Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “the lost generation.” It was repeated by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, his famous novel of Paris, and is often used to describe the intellectuals, poets, artists, and novelists who rejected the values of post World War I America. They relocated to Paris and quickly adopted a bohemian lifestyle of excessive drink, messy love affairs, and the creation of some of the finest American literature ever written.    We give this lost generation of American writers in Europe a prominent place in the landscape of 20th century American life and culture. They led the way in exploring themes of spiritual alienation, self-exile, and cultural criticism, leaving a distinct mark on our intellectual history. They expressed their critical response in innovative literary forms, challenged traditional assumptions about writing and self-expression, and paved the way for subsequent generations of avant-garde writers. Myth . . .

Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s (Bulgaria 1994-96) new collection Cold Snap is out, published this June by Southern Methodist University Press. In his review of the book on this website (which is also quoted on the flap copy of Cynthia’s book) Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93) writes, “If Lorrie Moore had served as a Peace Corps voluneer in Bulgaria, she might have written Cold Snap.” Also on the flap copy, Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) writes: “I am greatly impressed with Cold Snap, a look at Bulgarian life–family life, school life, frustration, even passion and desire. Cynthia Phoel writes from inside this culture, convincingly and with real insight.” Not bad praise from two great RPCV writers. Cynthia was stationed in a Bulgarian town not unlike the one in her stories. She holds degrees from Cornell and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and her stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Gettyburg Review, and Harvard Review. . . .