"An American Girlhood"

The delightful first chapter of what would have been Jeanne Kirkpatrick's Memoir is here. RTWT --it's got poverty, Injuns, Texas oil fields, the frontier, a mugging in Chicago --and wise lessons on the republic! I like her description of college life:

I read Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, and I became a Utilitarian. I read Milton, Newman, and Chesterton and became a muscular Christian. I read Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Eliot, and Auden and became a modernist. I read Lippmann, Veblen, Strachey, the Coles, and Marx himself and became a socialist. I made a tenuous effort to take this last exercise in theory into the realm of practice one afternoon when I went with a girlfriend to a socialist picnic. But the day turned into a disaster when a young man who seemed to me to be filled with working-class authenticity took one look at us and asked us nastily if we were "slumming."