On my first day at Princeton, in 1967, I met my first Southerner. I didn't like him—monogrammed dress shirt, bright red golf slacks shouting for attention, and washing (with the assistance of a black janitor) his new white Pontiac LeMans. He might, for all I could see, be ultimate Kappa Alpha. "Samuel Francis Pickering," he told me. His accent filled the air with molasses. I stirred it with a question. "Where are you from?" "Nashville," he responded. When I reciprocated, "Fayetteville, Arkansas," he volunteered a prediction: "You're going to hate it here."

I had never lived outside Arkansas, nor outside the 20th century. At Princeton, I entered by the university gates a Gothic world where fierce gray gargoyles scowled from atop the great stone heaps I now called home. The medieval world that was the campus would have stretched the conservative principles of the most old-fashioned of men. I dived straight into the gargoyle's den, taking rooms at the Graduate College, a particularly imposing example of Gothic architecture, laid out in quads, with well-groomed grounds and benefiting spring and summer from the refining and aromatic influences of the adjacent English formal garden. Over the green-tiled roof of the college, defining the skyline, soared Cleveland Tower, alleged to be a larger but otherwise perfect replica of the main tower at Cambridge University. It was a fit symbol: we were in all ways possible an English outpost, a Cambridge on the western horizon where the mind was never quiet; the tongue and pen, never still.

Nor had I ever seen a prettier town. Princeton was a postcard village then, with its imitation-English main street and square, its residential acres of flowering trees and shrubs