The Old Alien by the Kitchen Window: Selected Writings

The Old Alien by the Kitchen Window brings together a selection of writing by one of America’s greatest lost voices of social justice, Louis Adamic, whose life was as adventurous and idealistic as his death was mysterious and tragic. As an immigrant writer, Adamic explored the United States that most people of his time wanted to ignore: the dynamic, multicultural, interracial, and multilingual landscape of its ethnic and racial minorities. Adamic took this same energy to his native land, writing about political struggles in Yugoslavia before and after World War II, and became an ardent supporter of Marshal Tito—making him a target during the McCarthy era. This volume offers readers access to the entire breadth of Adamic’s cultural project: the ascendency of diversity in America.
Born in Slovenia, Louis Adamic (1898-1951) immigrated to the United States in 1913 at the age of fifteen, fought in World War I, and later became a writer, translator, and editor focused on immigration and race in America. He was the author of over fifteen books, including memoirs and reportage. He was also founding editor of Common Ground, a literary magazine published by the Common Council for American Unity, of which he was the director. Adamic was known as a vocal social critic who fought for immigrant rights, cultural pluralism, and racial tolerance. While his early books focus on European ethnic groups who had immigrated to the United States in the 19th– and 20th centuries, his later work focuses on Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans, venturing into question of interracial marriage and the cultural clash that exists between what he called “old-stock” Americans and the nation’s ethnic minorities.