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• More titles by Alistair Cooke

Synopsis

Alistair Cooke, then a Washington correspondent for The Guardian, recognized a great story to be told in investigating at first hand the effects of the Second World War on America and the daily lives of Americans as they adjusted to radically new circumstances. Within weeks of the Pearl Harbour attack, with a reporter's zeal Cooke set off on a circuit of the entire country to see what the war had done to people.

He talked to everyone he encountered on his extensive trip, from miners to lumberjacks, to war-profiteers, to day-labourers, to local politicians - even the unfortunate Japanese-Americans who had been rapidly interned in stark, desert camps. Intertwined with his reflections on changing landscapes and cityscapes and with his unique storytelling skills and insight, his acute ability to define detail and catch the sounds and syntax of different regional accents, this is Alistair Cooke moving into his prime as a reporter and a writer.

His prescient observations on what was happening and considerations on where America was headed provide a clearer understanding of a critical moment in world history just prior to the dropping of the Atomic bomb. This unique travelogue celebrates an important American character and the indomitable spirit of a nation that was to inspire Cooke's reports and broadcasts for some sixty years.

Reviews

Critic Review:

'To read [Alistair Cooke's American Journey] is to open a time capsule, or rather a bottle of the finest vintage wine, from that era, untouched, and containing the essence of a vanished America'
Independent on Sunday

Interview

5th June 2006

By Colin Webb, Alistair Cooke’s literary executor.

The manuscript for Alistair Cooke’s American Journey had been stored, apparently lost, in one of the writer’s closets for some 60 years.  It had resided amongst an overflowing collection of documents and papers, that Alistair’s assistant had finally been allowed to sort out.  He was an inveterate hoarder of everything.  The process of sorting out what he called ‘the warehouse I inhabit that masquerades as my bedroom’ had been ongoing since Boston University had offered to acquire Alistair’s papers, and, having accepted, he was as he wrote, ‘made to face, to expose, the closets and catacombs bursting with thousands of clippings and notes and letters and articles and reviews and records and tapes and manuscripts (so called) and other rubbish.’  He viewed Boston University as the provider of ‘a god sent landfill’.  So some 20 or so musty folders containing well over 200,000 words of one of the ‘so called’ manuscripts, came tumbling out of the closet just a few weeks before Alistair died on 30th March 2004.

Knowing that Alistair was gravely ill I arrived in New York to see him on the 24th March, for what I knew would be the last time.  He still insisted on maintaining the normal arrangements and so Pam, my wife, and I, were summoned for the Huntley Brinkley hour as he called it, drinks with the 6pm news.  Despite the overwhelming significance of the occasion, the famous apartment on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, had been prepared with the best of intentions of it being business as usual.  Our small group, the two of us, AC, his wife Jane, daughter Susan, and assistant Patti Yasek, fell in with the demand to be as convivial as was possible.  The conversation was wide ranging and entertaining, the drinks serious and intoxicating.

A moment arrived when AC with solemn formality wanted to read a statement that he had prepared earlier.  With witnesses present he duly appointed me to act as his literary executor.  About the newly discovered manuscript he had written:

‘In particular, he may do what he chooses with the recently discovered manuscript tentatively called ‘A Nation at War: American Life on the Home Front 1941-45’ Never published because Hiroshima killed it.  It was meant to be out in the late Fall 1945.  Subsequently I lost the manuscript but recalled many anecdotes for my “Letter”.  The true versions are of course, in the book!’

Of course I was honoured and touched by the sentiment and told him that I would perform the duty to the best of my ability, at which he responded ‘well, that will have do!’

He died the following week.  Given the enormous range of tributes and praise written about Alistair it made good sense to proceed immediately with the volume of Letter From America which Penguin have published so successfully in hardback and paperback.  American Journey is the voice of the much younger Cooke, writing at the age of 32 as newly confirmed American citizen and Washington correspondent.  Eager to establish what was happening in the country as the USA entered the war in 1942, Alistair’s travelogue is a unique document that has resonances even for today.  As Jonathan Yardley observed in his review in the Washington Post: ‘He understood, perhaps more keenly than most native Americans, that ours is a land of deep contradictions, capable of great generosity yet susceptible to smugness and arrogance.  In his last years, he often spoke to his British listeners of his apprehensions about this country’s future, and there are hints of this concern in his account of America at war.  Thus, it is not surprising that much of what Cooke says here remains pertinent.’

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