“Marxism… was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.” —Mary McCarthy

As an undergraduate, I studied the literature of England and America and fell in love with the charge of rhythmic language, the Anglo-Saxon drum of verse, the symphonic progress of prose. Entering graduate school many years and a few professions later, I hoped to rekindle that love. But I succumbed, like every other student I knew, to the doctrinaire theories of feminism, historicism, and Marxism, the great critical isms of the time, which tested the novels and poems I had so admired. These isms and the professors who intoned the jargon of literary theory so befuddled my mind, I was certain I’d never get out of academia.

Such is my recovered memory after finishing in 1986 the master’s program in American literature at the University of California, San Diego. As an M.A. candidate in the mid-1980s (I applied twice but was not accepted to the Ph.D. program, which that year took five out of one hundred applicants), I wrote three seminar papers in four semesters to qualify for the harder task of finding an original topic to work on. It took a month to draft a coherent, three-paragraphed idea for a thesis, which I then submitted for approval to a committee of professors. Like most students, I knew nothing about a thesis. The professors had written them, so I assumed they would train me in the nuances of thesis-making, in turn insuring graduation. But many profs were elsewhere—on committees, on leave, at home Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays—or they were incommunicative, especially about practicalities. A few helped, and I stayed close to them. But despite the onus on me to learn, they were the gatekeepers, often disparaging my writing, which in counter-turn delayed graduation. The Rest of the Story.