Books: Innocent Abroad

FROM THE HEART OF EUROPE (194 pp.) F. O. Matthiessen—Oxford ($3).

Harvard Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen is a bald, mild-mannered little bachelor who thinks the job of U.S. intellectuals is to "rediscover and rearticulate" the need for Socialism. He spent the last six months of 1947 lecturing on U.S. literature in Salzburg and Prague and writing a book "about some of the things it means to be an American today." But From the Heart of Europe never gets close to that subject. It is one of those embarrassingly naive excursions into politics and world...

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