On the Road
Santiago Ramos May 23, 2011 - 11:36am
Becoming Americans
Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing
Edited by Ilan Stavans
Library of America, $40, 850 pp.
Becoming Americans is a collection of eighty-five accounts of immigration to the United States. Although its title might suggest something triumphalistic, the book’s contributors are alert not only to the possibilities and satisfactions of immigrant life, but also to its ironies and tragedies. The anthology includes the stories of an English playboy novelist (Christopher Isherwood), a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet (Czesław Miłosz), and an exiled Serbian writer (Aleksandar...
