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The Adamics visited Galichnik, a little mountain "village of grass widows," whose men, famed stonecutters and masons, go out to work all over the world, come home for a month in the summer, if they are not too far away. In Montenegro Adamic heard a story which he says illustrates the Montenegrin's two great virtues: A man about to be shot was asked if he had ever been in a worse fix. Yes, he answered, once—"when a man came to see me from afar and I was so poor that I had nothing in the house to offer him." Adamic was offered and refused the Jugoslavian Order of the White Eagle, afterward had a mutually cold interview with King Alexander, whom he considers of a piece with "the rest of the tyrants and dictators."
So nervous did Adamic finally become about Jugoslavian censorship that he decided to leave the country unexpectedly. Safely across the border with the notes for his book, he breathed more easily. Though he was glad to have seen the old country again, he was yet gladder that he did not have to live there. He feels sorry for Jugoslavians, thinks they are condemned to be cannon fodder at no distant date.
The Author, eldest surviving son of his parents, was slated for some learned post in his native land, but hated school, failed his examinations. When his outraged parents put him in a stricter religious school he ran away. A book called Do Not Go to America decided him to emigrate to the U. S. Landed there at 14 without knowing a word of English, he went to the hardest school of all: dug ditches, loaded freight, welded metals, wove textiles, swept floors, waited on tables. He learned to read English, to write. Editor Henry Louis Mencken encouraged him. Adamic wrote a history of U. S. labor troubles (Dynamite), a book about his U. S. experiences (Laughing in the Jungle). Now 34, with his last book chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Louis Adamic is established as a U. S. writer.