evelyn_b

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France.

In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.

Shed of everything else
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road —
Crawling on my summer robes.

According to Hanna and McAllister, it was the depression years of the thirties which "brought the needs of youth sharply into focus." In 1933 the Longmans, Green and Company published Let The Hurricane Roar by Rose Wilder Lane. It proved to be so popular that they set out to find other books of this type. This publishing company was the first to describe these books as "junior novels." The term was not generally accepted by other publishing firms or the critics, because eight years later when Let the Hurricane Roar was reviewed again, it was called a "novelette."