In the late 1950s Philip French spent a year studying in the United States, where he got married and eked out a journalism scholarship helping Indiana Univers- ity's athletic stars write their freshman English essays. These were the late Eisenhower years when the beat generation of the emerging counter-culture confronted the ' silent generation' of post-war conformity. Recently he returned to America to visit his old Middle-Western campus and to look up some old student friends whose occupations now range from editing a small town newspaper to commanding a regiment of army engineers. And with them he reconstructs that distant world of the 50s and reports on how 20 years and creeping middle age have affected their perceptions of themselves and of America.