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If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. Other Books by. Louis Adamic. An American Immigrant. His Old Country. New York and London. Copyright, , by Louis Adamic. Printed in the United States of America. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the text may be reproduced in any. A special section of illustrations drawn from the scenes of this book follows page The page numbers given with the captions accompanying each illustration refer to related passages in the text.
E arly in the spring of , when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship requiring me to go to Europe for a year, I was thirty-three and had been in the United States nineteen years.
In those nineteen years I had become an American; indeed, I had often thought I was more American than were most of the native citizens of my acquaintance. Events and things outside of America interested me but incidentally: only in so far as they were related to, or as they affected, the United States. I spoke, wrote, and read only in English.
For sixteen years I had had practically no close contact with immigrants of my native nationality. For three years I had been a soldier in the American army. In the last few years I had become an American writer, writing on American subjects for American readers. And I had married an American girl. To her I was an American from toes to scalp. None the less, I wrote to my family in the old country that my wife, who was an American and spoke no Slovenian, and I should, in all probability, visit them on Sunday afternoon, May 15th.
