The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography

As a young man, he was interested in both leftwing politics and Catholicism. Fittingly, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, a pacifist group that advocated a radical interpretation of the Gospel. Above all else, Harrington was an intellectual. He loved arguing about culture and politics, preferably over beer, and his Jesuit education made him a fine debater and rhetorician. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...

This book, then, will deal primarily with the meaning of my encounters with the political and social movements of the Left during the seventies and eighties, nationally and internationally. I will, however, try to convey the experiences of my public self’s daily life: teaching at Queens College in the City University of New York; moving to the suburbs after thirty years in the Bohemian heartland of Greenwich Village; and what it is like to be a writer. And there is one experience I will describe that simply refuses to be reduced to its sociological dimensions: facing up to premature death through cancer.

I theorize too much. Ultimately, the most important thing I want to say about being a long-distance runner is that, prior to all the books and music and movies, there was in me a hunger and thirst for justice. For me this was a second nature, a drive more powerful and lasting than romantic love or sexual desire. And in a profound sense I feel that I showed no morality, no will, in actuating upon that instinct, because I could not have done otherwise.

There is no doubt that “life” plays a conservatizing role in most biographies. Those blinding, all-encompassing radical certitudes, which sometimes are the epiphanies of youth, are not so dazzling any more. Instead, the complexities and shadows come into view. At the same time, marriage and parenthood are indeed two of the great forces making people bourgeois.

The amount of money actually spent on the poor by the War on Poverty and Great Society was distressingly modest and, in any case, most of the programs that had been funded, such as Head Start and job training, had done reasonably well. The really massive increase in Washington’s outlays had gone to Social Security and it was rightly so popular that even the conservatives were loath to attack it. When Nixon charged that the sixties liberals had “thrown money at problems’ – spent wildly and ineffectively – he was being as loose with the truth as he was during the Watergate cover-up.

When I had my brief stint at a “straight” job – as a writer-trainee for Life magazine in 1950 – I was told by a friendly co-worker that the management didn’t like people who joined the American Newspaper Guild. I signed up immediately.