PSU history professor takes first-hand look at tumultuous period
David A. Horowitz has been teaching history at Portland State University since 1968. Horowitz often would share his own experiences about growing up in America and being on the edge of various social movements with his classes. The anecdotes were so well received that his students encouraged Horowitz to put them down on paper.
Eventually, Horowitz decided to follow his students advice. Twelve years later, Horowitz has published his memoir Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey. The memoir is Horowitzs firsthand account of the tumultuous period between the 1950s and the early 21st century.
Horowitz has lofty goals for Getting There ($17.95, $3.99 Kindle, Inkwater Press, 429 pages).
Id like to encourage a world view that is not mechanistic in looking at society, that leaves room for mystery and surprise, Horowitz says. I want to encourage readers to appreciate some of the wonderful expressive culture thats come out of American society. I particularly want to influence people whose sympathies are with the progressive communities to appreciate some of the richness of American culture and society and to understand some of those they disagree with.
I sort of want an inspired view of life. I want people to have a sense of awe ..., not just some negative criticism. People need to keep up hope, because once you retreat into bitterness its a complete dead-end. You cant go there because then youre completely useless.
A West Bronx and Long Island, N.Y., native, Horowitz was born into a family of writers.
Everyone has always been a writer in my family, Horowitz says. Both of my parents were writing from when they were children. They were writing musical parodies and skits and theatrical pieces and poetry. They had a play produced Off-Broadway in 1953 that ran in a church basement. It got panned, but they got it on stage.
Horowitzs previous writing experience was publishing history books (Americas Political Class Under Fire: The Twentieth Centurys Great Cultural War, The Peoples Voice: A Populist Cultural History of Modern America). Horowitz did have some experience in memoir writing, though.
Years ago, we brought a speaker into Portland State to speak about writing, Horowitz says. He said that people have the most vivid memories from the time theyre between about 8 and 12 years old. He said once you turn 12 you get so self-conscious that your image of yourself interferes with your memory.
He asked us as a writing exercise to write a page about what we remembered about that time period. That was the time I was growing up in the West Bronx. I started writing it, and I realized he was totally right. I had all these vivid memories. I later published a version of that in the early 1990s in a newsletter that was called Back in the Bronx.
As he began working on Getting There in the summer of 2003, Horowitz began by examining the lives of his parents.
I had so much material from my parents, Horowitz says. My dad had written a typed, unpublished memoir of his entire childhood up until he got married. My mother and father had desk-published poetry. I had my parents letters. When I started it, I started thinking, God, my parents history is more interesting than my own. There was a lot of material on my family history.
By the time the manuscript was ready to be submitted, I submitted it to one university press in the region and they asked me to cut it by a third. I had to cut out a lot of the family history. There was too much. It was another book. I wound up incorporating some of the family history in flashbacks, though.