Barbara Probst Solomon has fueled an entire career on what one might call retroliberal nostalgia. A diverse group, retroliberals range from editors of The New Republic, that stronghold of Fifties liberalism, through the bow-tied, Trumanesque presidential candidate Paul Simon, and on to any number of tweedy university types. Though ununited by any specific creed, retroliberals share a common pride in their independence from the current liberal establishment, along with a common distrust for the New Left and its offshoots, from Jesse Jackson to deconstruction, and an equal distaste for anything that sounds at all like conservatism. They also share a general nostalgia for the intellectual and political world that sprang up among deserters from the Stalinist Old Left during the mid-1930s—with the founding of Partisan Review—and continued through the late 1950s, when the dreaded New Left made its first appearances. During the past few years alone, this nostalgia has produced half a dozen critical but extremely affectionate studies and memoirs of the period. Most recently, in The Last Intellectuals (1987), Russell Jacoby has lamented that, with the rapid extinction of the non-academic intellectual since the 1950s, giants have ceased to appear in the earth.

Beginning with the publication of her first book—The Beat of Life (1960), a novel about Columbia students during the Beat era—Barbara Probst Solomon has devoted herself more or less full-time to the project of looking back wistfully on the Forties and Fifties. In Arriving Where We Started{1972), a fictionalized memoir,