|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
"Well, why not tell what happened and bring Rabbit back." This was during the late '60s, when there was a lot of turmoil in America, and so I brought him back this time as kind of an everyman who is witnessing the pageant of protest and disturbance, distress, drug use, everything, almost everything was in that book, including the moon shot. In fact, the moon shot is kind of a central event in it, so that the Rabbit who came back the second time was a much more purposefully representative American than my initial Rabbit. He was just, you know, a high school athlete who had no where much to go after he graduated, whereas the second Rabbit was kind of a growing man trying to learn in a way. I've always seen Rabbit, and indeed Americans in general, as learners, as willing to learn. They may be slow to learn, but there is an openness to our mind set that I think enables us to overcome our mistakes or our prejudices and move forward. Certainly the world now is so much more open. I mean, it is easy to be sentimental about the '30s and '40s and the war time solidarity and all that, but there was so much racism, sexism, everything. It was a brutal world compared to the one we're trying to make now.
View Interview with John Updike
View Biography of John Updike
View Profile of John Updike
View Photo Gallery of John Updike
|
|
|
John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: I certainly bought into the American Dream that was voiced by the propagandists of World War II, and I was a great moviegoer, and the movies in the '30s and '40s were where you could see preachments about the American dream. So, I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity -- in the broadest sense -- with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action. For all of the knocks that we take in the foreign press, and we have taken a lot lately, I think this is still a country where people want to come, and they want to come, I think, because they feel they are -- a French friend of one of my stepsons, a boy about 16, just said about the way people dress in America, he said, "They are not afraid." I thought this was a great insight, you know. In France, a lot of people -- the French are in a way afraid not to dress in the appropriate costume of a happy housewife or whatever, and there is a kind of sense of the proper way to dress. And, in America you have the sense -- so that was his way of saying that it's a country without a government we need be afraid of. The country, the land has been good to me. I realize I was lucky, and born at a lucky time, too. So, I hesitate to prescribe for today's children, but I would hope they would grow up with something of the same sense that it's a privilege to be an American.
View Interview with John Updike
View Biography of John Updike
View Profile of John Updike
View Photo Gallery of John Updike
|
|
|
Mike Wallace
CBS News Correspondent
The other thing about the American Dream is to help others to achieve it, to realize it too, and to be willing to defend it, to be willing to go to the mat, to tell other people and to defend it with your body if necessary, with your mind, with your ethics, to be honest. I just can't imagine -- despite all our flaws, and we have plenty of them, the American Dream for me is the privilege of living in a society that is as good as ours is, with all its flaws, and God knows there are those, I can't think of any place in the world that I would rather live. I'm extraordinarily privileged, as the son of immigrants who came from no place.
View Interview with Mike Wallace
View Biography of Mike Wallace
View Profile of Mike Wallace
View Photo Gallery of Mike Wallace
|
|
|
Sanford Weill
Financier and Philanthropist
Sanford Weill: I've had a terrific life, from building one company to be the second largest company in the securities industry and merging that into American Express, and becoming president of that company. And not having a similar philosophy and leaving there, and starting all over again about ten and a half years ago. Having an opportunity to build, really from scratch, a company that's now one of the largest financial companies in the world. And at the same time, have an opportunity to do a lot of things that make our society better, and work with young people, and give them an opportunity to see what the American Dream is about. And get to feel better about themselves and teach them that education is the key that unlocks the door to their future.
View Interview with Sanford Weill
View Biography of Sanford Weill
View Profile of Sanford Weill
View Photo Gallery of Sanford Weill
|
| |
|
