About
I am a member of the Class of 1964. I entered Harvard in the fall of 1960 and took a leave of absence after my freshman year. In the summer of 1961 I went to what was then Tanganyika with a group of other Harvard students. When most of them returned to the United States at the end of the summer, I remained, doing famine relief work.
I went back to Harvard in the fall of 1962 and continued my studies until the spring of 1964, when I was given “permission to withdraw.” I spent six months in the Army Reserve, in order to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam, and then for most of the next three years I worked and traveled in Quebec, the Arctic, British Columbia, eastern and southern Africa, and Israel. I re-entered Harvard in the fall of 1967 and received the B.A. degree in the spring of 1968.
Since 1979 I have made my home in the Pacific Region, East Asia, and Europe. I have not had occasion to return to the United States in almost forty years, except for visits to various American embassies and consulates – which are of course technically U.S. territory – in order to renew my passport.
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Note: In the headings for some of the chapters, there are quotations in German – followed by an English translation – from books that were originally written in English. The reason for this oddity is that in preparing this draft of the novel, I had only the German version of these works available to me, and rather than omit the quotiations entirely, I thought it might be acceptable to provide them in German, on a provisional basis, along with my own English translation.
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Robert John Bennett
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Robert John Bennett
Ernst-Gnoss-Strasse 22
40219 Dusseldorf
Germany
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rjbennett@post.harvard.edu
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