The Uprooted [antikvár]

Preface to tlie New Edition THE TEXT STANDS AS WRITTEN. It is the product of another time, written from the perspective of earlier years. What value it has for future readers derives in part from the understanding afforded by the outlook of the 1930's and 1940's. The author of this book recalled in 1971 the painful process by which it took form and sorted out in memory and notes the elements which entered its composition. But he could not exclude impressions left by the intervening twenty years — years of change in the people of the country who were the subjects of his study, years too in which other scholars had added to the knowledge about the subject he had treated. Though the structure of the work as completed in 1950 left no space for their incorporation, the newer visions called for reflection and commentary. The manuscript that went to its first printer closed with a set of questions and affirmations which probed the meaning of the immigrant experience. The questions expressed doubts, the affirmations hopes, about the altered relationship of the individual and the community that affected immigrants most directly, but other Americans also. Two decades later, the Cix]