Stepping Westward

Book excerpt: At the height of the 1960s, a British writer accepts an academic post in America for a year that he’ll never forget English author James Walker has three books to his name, each greeted with middling success and then promptly forgotten. But his résumé is significant enough to earn him a yearlong appointment at Benedict Arnold University as the American college’s writer in residence. At Benedict Arnold, Walker is something of a celebrity—a firebrand of 1960s British literary culture whose work, though perhaps met with shrugs at home, is the subject of vibrant scholarly criticism among American academics. Walker, of course, is not quite what some were expecting, and culture clashes abound as he encounters the tropes of American academia in the sixties. Fusty, buttoned-up professors, spirited advocates of free love, and aggressively ambitious colleagues collide to ensure that Walker’s year in America will be anything but ordinary.