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John Steinbeck's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

Listen to an Audio Recording of John Steinbeck's Speech at the Nobel Banquet*

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Min Vackra Fru, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I thank the Swedish Academy for finding my work worthy of this highest honor.

In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence - but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.

Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love.

In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge and manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world.

It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet caught up with this great step, but there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed it is a part of the writer's responsibility to make sure that they do.

With humanity's long proud history of standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory.

Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel - a solitary man, the books say, a thoughtful man. He perfected the release of explosive forces, capable of creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by conscience or judgment.

Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even have foreseen the end result of his probing - access to ultimate violence - to final destruction. Some say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control, a safety valve. I think he found it finally only in the human mind and the human spirit. To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards.

They are offered for increased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world - for understanding and communication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations of the capacity for peace - the culmination of all the others.

Less than fifty years after his death, the door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice.

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world - of all living things.

The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.

Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased ...

In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

Prior to the speech, R. Sandler, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, commented, "Mr. John Steinbeck - In your writings, crowned with popular success in many countries, you have been a bold observer of human behaviour in both tragic and comic situations. This you have described to the reading public of the entire world with vigour and realism. Your Travels with Charley is not only a search for but also a revelation of America, as you yourself say: ‹This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.› Thanks to your instinct for what is genuinely American you stand out as a true representative of American life."

From Les Prix Nobel en 1962, Editor Göran Liljestrand, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1963
*
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John Steinbeck's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 Listen to an Audio Recording of John Steinbeck's Speech at the Nobel Banquet* Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Min Vackra Fru, Ladies and Gentlemen. I thank the Swedish Academy for finding my work worthy of this highest honor.

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Women and the Great Depression / Gilder Lehman

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Women and the Great Depression / Gilder Lehman

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In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt's It's Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: "The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must be met and it is their courage and determination which, time and again, have pulled us through worse crises than the present one." While women as a group could not end the Depression (mobilization for World War II deserves that credit), the country could never have survived the crisis without women's contributions.

"We didn't go hungry, but we lived lean." That expression sums up the experiences of many American families during the 1930s: they avoided stark deprivation but still struggled to get by. The typical woman in the 1930s had a husband who was still employed, although he had probably taken a pay cut to keep his job; if the man lost his job, the family often had enough resources to survive without going on relief or losing all its possessions. Still, Eleanor Roosevelt noted, "Practically every woman, whether she is rich or poor, is facing today a reduction of income." In 1935-1936 the median family income was $1160, which translated into $20-25 a week to cover all their expenses, including food, shelter, clothing, and perhaps an occasional treat like going to the movies. Women "made do" by substituting their own labor for something that previously had been bought with cash or by practicing petty economies like buying day-old bread or warming several dishes in the oven to save gas. Living so close to the edge, women prayed that no catastrophic accident or illness would swamp their tight budgets. "We had no choice," remembered one housewife. "We just did what had to be done one day at a time."

In many ways men and women experienced the Depression differently. Men were socialized to think of themselves as breadwinners; when they lost their jobs or saw their incomes reduced, they felt like failures because they couldn't take care of their families. Women, on the other hand, saw their roles in the household enhanced as they juggled to make ends meet. Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noticed this trend in a study of Muncie, Indiana, published in 1937: "The men, cut adrift from their usual routine, lost much of their sense of time and dawdled helplessly and dully about the streets; while in the homes the women's world remained largely intact and the round of cooking, housecleaning, and mending became if anything more absorbing." To put it another way, no housewife lost her job in the Depression.

Those traditional gender roles assumed that all women were members of families with a male breadwinner at its head, but that description did not always match reality. Women who were widowed or divorced, or whose husbands had deserted them, struggled to keep their families afloat; single women had to fend for themselves. These women were truly on the margins, practically invisible. The iconic image of the Depression is "The Forgotten Man": the newly poor, downwardly mobile, unemployed worker, often standing in a breadline or selling apples on a street corner. Women who found themselves in similar dire straits rarely turned up in public spaces like breadlines or street corners; instead they often tried to cope quietly on their own. "I've lived in cities for many months broke, without help, too timid to get in breadlines," remembered the writer Meridel LeSueur. "I've known many women to live like this until they simply faint on the street from privations, without saying a word to anyone. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse."

Women who sought relief or paid employment risked public scorn or worse for supposedly taking jobs and money away from more deserving men. When Norman Cousins realized that the number of gainfully employed women in 1939 roughly equaled the national unemployment total, he offered this flippant remedy: "Simply fire the women, who shouldn't be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression." Yet this attempt to make women scapegoats for the Depression rested on shaky grounds. Many women had no choice but to work, providing the sole source of support for themselves or their families. Plus, given the segmentation of the workforce by gender, it was not so simple-or even desired-for men to move into women's jobs, as a sociologist realized: "Few of the people who opposed married women's employment seem to realize that a coal miner or steel worker cannot very well fill the jobs of nursemaids, cleaning women, or the factory and clerical jobs now filled by women." Since traditionally male fields like heavy industry and manufacturing were the hardest hit by the Depression, while clerical and sales fields populated by women were somewhat less affected, this division of labor gave women workers a slight edge. Unfortunately it came with a price: reinforcing traditional stereotypes of what constituted women's work. Still, even the terrible economic crisis could not derail the overarching twentieth-century trend of women increasingly working for pay outside the home. According to census figures, the percentage of employed women fourteen and older actually rose during the Depression from 24.3 percent in 1930 to 25.4 percent in 1940, a gain of two million jobs. Even more dramatically, the number of married women working doubled during the decade.

When talking about women as a group, it is always important to ask "which women?" when generalizations are offered. Women experienced the Depression differently based on their age, marital status, geographical location, race and ethnicity, and a host of other factors. For example, the 1930s urban housewife had access to electricity and running water, while her rural equivalent usually struggled with the burdens of domesticity without such modern conveniences. (Only one in ten farm families in 1935 had electricity.) Farm families also struggled with declining agricultural prices, foreclosures, and in the Midwest, a terrible drought that contributed to the Dust Bowl migrations of that decade.

African Americans, long subject to discrimination and prejudice, often viewed the Depression differently from whites. Times had always been hard, and suddenly they just got a lot harder. The novelist and poet Maya Angelou, who grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, recalled, "The country had been in the throes of the Depression for two years before the Negroes in Stamps knew it. I think that everyone thought the Depression, like everything else, was for the white folks." In 1930 nine out of ten African American women worked in agriculture or domestic service, both areas hard hit by the depression. Housewives who previously hired servants began to do their own housework; sometimes white women competed for jobs previously abandoned as too undesirable to black women. In the South and West, Mexican American women on the bottom rung of the economic ladder faced similar conditions, but with an added dimension: the threat of deportation back to Mexico because of fears about competition for jobs and relief. In the depths of the Depression, perhaps one-third of the Mexican American population returned to Mexico, straining family ties and causing extreme financial hardship.

Herbert Hoover's initial response to the onset of the Depression in 1929 had been to turn to business, private charity, and state and local welfare councils to address the problem, but those resources quickly proved inadequate. When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, his New Deal forged new ground in expanding the presence of the federal government in the economy and making concrete connections between federal programs and the lives of everyday citizens.

And yet women struggled to be treated as equal citizens when trying to qualify for these new federal programs. One-quarter of National Recovery Administration codes set lower minimum wages for women than men performing the same jobs, and New Deal agencies like the Civil Works Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps gave jobs almost exclusively to men. Not considered suitable for heavy construction jobs, women on relief were shunted into sewing rooms; black and Mexican American women faced racial discrimination as well. The Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Acts did not initially cover major areas of women's employment such as agricultural work or domestic service. Furthermore, social security benefits were structured around a traditional model of a male breadwinner and dependent female housewife, which disadvantaged women who didn't fit that profile and implied that women deserved economic rights only in relation to men. The Wagner Act of 1935 fueled a dramatic growth in organized labor, and woman workers participated in major CIO strikes and union organizing drives, but few women held leadership positions.

The needs of women might have been forgotten entirely were it not for the efforts of an informal network of woman administrators who held important positions in the New Deal. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman in the Cabinet, oversaw many of the social welfare initiatives and Ellen Sullivan Woodward supervised women's relief projects for the Works Progress Administration, while Molly Dewson promoted an issue-oriented reform agenda from her position at the Democratic National Committee. Their effectiveness was dramatically enhanced by access to Eleanor Roosevelt, who used her position as First Lady to advance the causes of women, blacks, and other marginalized groups. Besides serving as a symbol of public-spirited womanhood in a time of national crisis, Eleanor Roosevelt served as the conscience of the New Deal.

According to writer Caroline Bird, the Depression left "an invisible scar" on those who lived through it, including the nation's women. Forced to take on even more important roles in their homes and families, women played often unrecognized roles in helping the country through the Great Depression. Hard times worked to reinforce traditional gender roles, not subvert them. Ironically, women's Depression-era contributions and strong identification with home and family may have helped lay the foundation for the so-called feminine mystique of the 1950s.

From 1997 to 2005 Susan Ware served as editor of volume five of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth-century American history and the history of American women, as well as biography. She has published books on women in the New Deal and the 1930s; biographies of Molly Dewson, Amelia Earhart, and Mary Margaret McBride; and a women's history anthology.

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In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt's It's Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: "The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must be met and it is their courage and determination which, time and again, have pulled us through worse crises than the present one."

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History of Psychiatric Hospitals / Penn Nursing

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History of Psychiatric Hospitals / Penn Nursing

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The history of psychiatric hospitals was once tied tightly to that of all American hospitals. Those who supported the creation of the first early-eighteenth-century public and private hospitals recognized that one important mission would be the care and treatment of those with severe symptoms of mental illnesses. Like most physically sick men and women, such individuals remained with their families and received treatment in their homes. Their communities showed significant tolerance for what they saw as strange thoughts and behaviors. But some such individuals seemed too violent or disruptive to remain at home or in their communities. In East Coast cities, both public almshouses and private hospitals set aside separate wards for the mentally ill. Private hospitals, in fact, depended on the money paid by wealthier families to care for their mentally ill husbands, wives, sons, and daughters to support their main charitable mission of caring for the physically sick poor.

But the opening decades of the nineteenth-century brought to the United States new European ideas about the care and treatment of the mentally ill. These ideas, soon to be called "moral treatment," promised a cure for mental illnesses to those who sought treatment in a very new kind of institution-an "asylum." The moral treatment of the insane was built on the assumption that those suffering from mental illness could find their way to recovery and an eventual cure if treated kindly and in ways that appealed to the parts of their minds that remained rational. It repudiated the use of harsh restraints and long periods of isolation that had been used to manage the most destructive behaviors of mentally ill individuals. It depended instead on specially constructed hospitals that provided quiet, secluded, and peaceful country settings; opportunities for meaningful work and recreation; a system of privileges and rewards for rational behaviors; and gentler kinds of restraints used for shorter periods.

Many of the more prestigious private hospitals tried to implement some parts of moral treatment on the wards that held mentally ill patients. But the Friends Asylum, established by Philadelphia's Quaker community in 1814, was the first institution specially built to implement the full program of moral treatment. The Friends Asylum remained unique in that it was run by a lay staff rather than by medical men and women. The private institutions that quickly followed, by contrast, chose physicians as administrators. But they all chose quiet and secluded sites for these new hospitals to which they would transfer their insane patients. Massachusetts General Hospital built the McLean Hospital outside of Boston in 1811; the New York Hospital built the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan in 1816; and the Pennsylvania Hospital established the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital across the river from the city in 1841. Thomas Kirkbride, the influential medical superintendent of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, developed what quickly became known as the "Kirkbride Plan" for how hospitals devoted to moral treatment should be built and organized. This plan, the prototype for many future private and public insane asylums, called for no more than 250 patients living in a building with a central core and long, rambling wings arranged to provide sunshine and fresh air as well as privacy and comfort.

With both the ideas and the structures established, reformers throughout the United States urged that the treatment available to those who could afford private care now be provided to poorer insane men and women. Dorothea Dix, a New England school teacher, became the most prominent voice and the most visible presence in this campaign. Dix travelled throughout the country in the 1850s and 1860s testifying in state after state about the plight of their mentally ill citizens and the cures that a newly created state asylum, built along the Kirkbride plan and practicing moral treatment, promised. By the 1870s virtually all states had one or more such asylums funded by state tax dollars.

By the 1890s, however, these institutions were all under siege. Economic considerations played a substantial role in this assault. Local governments could avoid the costs of caring for the elderly residents in almshouses or public hospitals by redefining what was then termed "senility" as a psychiatric problem and sending these men and women to state-supported asylums. Not surprisingly, the numbers of patients in the asylums grew exponentially, well beyond both available capacity and the willingness of states to provide the financial resources necessary to provide acceptable care. But therapeutic considerations also played a role. The promise of moral treatment confronted the reality that many patients, particularly if they experienced some form of dementia, either could not or did not respond when placed in an asylum environment.

The medical superintendents of asylums took such critiques seriously. Their most significant effort to improve the quality of the care of their patients was the establishment of nurses' training schools within their institutions. Nurses' training schools, first established in American general hospitals in the 1860s and 1870s, had already proved critical to the success of these particular hospitals, and asylum superintendents hoped they would do the same for their institutions. These administrators took an unusual step. Rather than following an accepted European model in which those who trained as nurses in psychiatric institutions sat for a separate credentialing exam and carried a different title, they insisted that all nurses who trained in their psychiatric institutions sit for the same exam as those who trained in general hospitals and carry the same title of "registered nurse." Leaders of the nascent American Nurses Association fought hard to prevent this, arguing that those who trained in asylums lacked the necessary medical, surgical, and obstetric experiences common to general-hospital-trained nurses. But they could not prevail politically. It would be decades before American nursing leaders had the necessary social and political weight to ensure that all training school graduates-irrespective of the site of their training-had comparable clinical and classroom experiences.

It is, at present, hard to assess the impact of nurses' training schools on the actual care of patients in psychiatric institutions. In some larger public institutions, the students worked only on particular wards. It does seem that they had a more substantive impact on the care of patients in much smaller and private psychiatric hospitals where they had more contact with more patients. Still, it may be that their most enduring contribution was opening the practice of professional nursing to men. Training schools in asylums, unlike those in general hospitals, actively welcomed men. Male students found places either in schools that also accepted women or in separate schools formed just for them.

Training schools for nurses, however, could not stop the assault on psychiatric asylums. The economic crisis of the 1930s drastically cut state appropriations, and World War II created acute shortages of personnel. Psychiatrists, themselves, began looking for other practice opportunities by more closely identifying with general, more reductionistic, medicine. Some established separate programs-often called "psychopathic hospitals"-within general hospitals to treat patients suffering from acute mental illnesses. Others turned to the early-twentieth-century's new Mental Hygiene Movement and created outpatient clinics and new forms of private practice focused on actively preventing the disorders that might result in a psychiatric hospitalization. And still others experimented with new forms of therapies that posited brain pathology as a cause of mental illness in the same way that medical doctors posited pathology in other body organs as the cause of physical symptoms: they tried insulin and electric shock therapies, psychosurgery, and different kinds of medications.

By the 1950s, the death knell for psychiatric asylums had sounded. A new system of nursing homes would meet the needs of vulnerable elders. A new medication, chlorpromazine, offered hopes of curing the most persistent and severe psychiatric symptoms. And a new system of mental health care, the community mental health system, would return those suffering from mental illnesses to their families and their communities.

Today, only a small number of the historic public and private psychiatric hospitals exist. Psychiatric care and treatment are now delivered through a web of services including crisis services, short-term and general-hospital-based acute psychiatric care units, and outpatient services ranging from twenty-four-hour assisted living environments to clinics and clinicians' offices offering a range of psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments. The quality and availability of these outpatient services vary widely, leading some historians and policy experts to wonder if "asylums," in the true sense of the word, might be still needed for the most vulnerable individuals who need supportive living environments.

Patricia D'Antonio is Carol E. Ware Professor in Mental Health Nursing, Chair, Department of Family and Community Health, Director, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, and Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

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The history of psychiatric hospitals was once tied tightly to that of all American hospitals. Those who supported the creation of the first early-eighteenth-century public and private hospitals recognized that one important mission would be the care and treatment of those with severe symptoms of mental illnesses.

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All works by Woody Guthrie are held under U.S. Copyright Law. If you are interested in using a song for publication, recording, performance, or other, please contact the appropriate publisher listed at the bottom of each lyric.

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Optimism / Pessimism & the American Dream / The Atlantic

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Optimism / Pessimism & the American Dream / The Atlantic

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A survey reveals a huge gap between Americans' pessimism about the nation and their optimism about their own lives.

Roger Sayles / Flickr

The young feel this exuberance most acutely, as might be expected, but so too do racial minorities. Seventy-seven percent of Millennials say they're living the dream or believe they can; among African Americans and Asian Americans, that number rises to 82 percent. Among Latinos, it's 83 percent. This is a far cry from the early to mid-2000s, when Gallup polls showed African Americans were the least satisfied with the state of the nation-generally by about 20 points, the reverse of what it is today. And it contrasts with a recent run of media accounts saying minorities have lost faith in the American Dream.

Visions of a successful life in the U.S. and abroad
Read More

We've seen this gap between national pessimism and personal optimism before. In March 1996, when President Clinton was seeking re-election, 61 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the direction of the country and 66 percent thought economic conditions were only fair or poor. But research showed that Americans were actually very optimistic about their own lives. President Clinton tapped into this sentiment and ran an upbeat campaign focused on "Building a Bridge to the 21st Century." Today, presidential candidates on both sides appear to be taking a different tack, focusing on the nation's hurdles rather than its opportunities and accomplishments. They are accurately reading voters' societal pessimism. But if candidates were to tap into voters' personal optimism, they might find an opening to consolidate the nation around a shared sense of hope.

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The American Dream: Personal Optimists, National Pessimists

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A survey reveals a huge gap between Americans' pessimism about the nation and their optimism about their own lives. The young feel this exuberance most acutely, as might be expected, but so too do racial minorities. Seventy-seven percent of Millennials say they're living the dream or believe they can; among African Americans and Asian Americans, that number rises to 82 percent.

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Maya Angelou, "Caged Bird" from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? Copyright © 1983 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House Inc., 1994)

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Caged Bird by Maya Angelou | Poetry Foundation

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Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep Poem / Mary Elizabeth Frye

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Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep Poem / Mary Elizabeth Frye

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Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

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Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep Poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye - Poem Hunter

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Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye. .Do not stand at my grave and weep I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight . Page

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Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air;

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

Grieve, and they turn and go;

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

Be sad, and you lose them all,-

There are none to decline your nectared wine,

But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;

Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

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Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox | Poetry Foundation

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Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care.

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Officials of the association, while saying they condemn the conduct described in the essay, are resisting the subpoena on the the ground that an Illinois press shield law prohibits a court from ordering disclosure of privileged information unless the court finds that all other sources have been exhausted.

The essay, entitled ''It's Over, Debbie,'' does not indicate when or where the incident took place. Some physicians question whether the incident took place at all.

The essay appeared without explanation or comment in a section reserved for personal commentary called ''A Piece of My Mind,'' and was published, over the objections of several staff members, because of the topic's importance, said Dr. George Lundberg, editor of The Journal. A Disservice to the Profession

Dr. Mark Siegler, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, said the essay did a disservice to the medical profession by giving the appearance of sanctioning the physician's behavior. ''This could change medicine profoundly and irreversibly,'' he said. ''It undermines the profession if the public believes that doctors have the power to kill people, and occasionally do.''

Kirk Johnson, general counsel to the A.M.A., said the association had gone on record as opposing active euthanasia and that, although the association's board of trustees endorsed the editor's decision, neither the essay nor The Journal represented the association's opinions. ''The Journal does not necessarily represent the A.M.A.'s position on anything,'' Mr. Johnson said.

The editors found the article disturbing from the start. ''We were blown away,'' Dr. Lundberg said. ''It simply arrived in the mail like any other manuscript. We knew immediately that this was extremely important and worthy of serious deliberation.''

Dr. Lundberg declined to say how long The Journal had the essay before publishing it, but he said that articles usually appear within five or six months after they are received. The essay underwent the standard peer review process, he said, adding,''We considered many medical and legal aspects prior to publishing.''

The Journal agreed to publish the article anonymously, a decision that breaks with scholarly tradition but that is not unheard of at The Journal. The use of anonymous sources ''doesn't happen very often, but it happens,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''The principle is important enough that even if it happened once it's worth defending.''

Dr. Arnold S. Relman, editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious medical journals, said that identifying the author would have been a condition of publishing such a piece. ''We don't publish articles anonymously,'' Dr. Relman said.

Dr. Lundberg, The Journal's editor, acknowledged that the staff did not verify the account before publishing it. He also said he knows the name of the author, but added, ''We consider that privileged information as part of the editor-author relationship.''

''Medical editors traditionally trust authors to provide articles that are true,'' Dr. Lundberg said. ''We do not have the capacity for independent investigation of every research article or essay. In that way, we are sitting ducks for fraud by potential liars.''

Experts on the First Amendment said prosecutors were in the difficult position of pursuing a case without first knowing whether they have the authority to do so.

''There is no clear indication that the doctor is in Illinois or that the crime, if there was one, occurred in Illinois,'' said Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press. ''Therefore, it is not an interest of Illinois.'' Revival of an Old Debate

As expected, the incident has revived a longstanding debate in the medical community about euthanasia, even as signatures are being gathered in California to put an initiative on the ballot that would make ''mercy killing'' legal under certain circumstances.

While many doctors have condoned for some time the practice of withdrawing life support systems at the request of terminally ill patients, legalizing the direct killing of those patients is deplored by most physicians.

A poll conducted last June by Louis Harris and Associates and made public last month showed that physicians are far more adamant on the issue than the general public.

The poll, which was commissioned by the Harvard Community Health Plan, showed that 66 percent of the doctors considered it wrong for a physician to comply with a patient's wishes to end his life, as against 38 percent of the general public. Two hundred physicians and 1,250 citizens were polled. The margin of sampling error was two percentage points for the general public and four percentage points for the doctors. Some Fears and Arguments

Opponents of mercy killing say the essay only underscores their fears and arguments.

''This is a perfect example of why this kind of conduct should not be legalized,'' said Giles Scofield, legal counsel for Concern for Dying, a patient's rights group based in New York. ''Some would say there is a fine line between the withdrawal of treatment and active euthanasia. This doctor clearly crossed that line.''

Advocates of euthanasia also found the essay troubling.

''We're shocked by the speed and spontaneity with which it happened,'' said Derek Humphry, founder and director of the Hemlock Society, a Los Angeles-based group that promotes voluntary euthanasia. ''People say, 'Let's get this over with,' when the doctor comes in to draw blood. That's not a request for death.''

Some physicians say the essay points up a problem in the training of residents. ''The cold, bitter anger in the essay makes you wonder, 'What are we doing in the socialization of our doctors?' '' said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota.

''There was a quick inference, an irresponsible leap and no consultation with anyone else,'' Dr. Caplan said. ''It was horrific, but it ought not cast a pall over a discussion of mercy killing.'' Change in Attitude Feared

Dr. Siegler said he considered the case an anomaly, and called it ''a personal failing that goes beyond the system.'' But he said he feared that the appearance of sanctioning active euthanasia could change the way doctors approach their work.

''If you go to the bedside of a patient and the option of killing the patient exists, as it did in the mind of this resident, doctors will be less inclined to think of alternative medical possibilities,'' Dr. Siegler said. ''It will change the mind and attitude of even the most conscientious doctors. And patients will be afraid that their doctor may be a great believer in death with dignity when all they need is their asthma medicine.''

The Rev. John Paris, a professor of medical ethics at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., said such fears were not wholly unwarranted now, adding, ''I think it happens more often than the public would like to believe.''

Physicians are divided over the plausibility of the story, however. Some say that 20 milligrams of morphine would not be sufficient to kill most adults. Others question a reference to an ''alcohol drip,'' a sedative technique now considered outmoded.

Since the essay appeared, The Journal has been besieged with letters on the subject, most of them criticizing the essay and The Journal for publishing it. A collection of those letters and a series of articles on the subject will appear in the April 8 edition of The Journal, Dr. Lundberg said.

''The essay was published with the purpose of generating responsible debate on a very important topic that transcended any personal motivation,'' he added. ''I believe it was successful in doing so.''

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Isabel Wilkerson and Special To the New York Times

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Essay on Mercy Killing Reflects Conflict On Ethics for Physicians and Journalists

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Officials of the association, while saying they condemn the conduct described in the essay, are resisting the subpoena on the the ground that an Illinois press shield law prohibits a court from ordering disclosure of privileged information unless the court finds that all other sources have been exhausted.

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subscribe to Hidden Brain podcast

Intuitively, many of us might think lonely people are lonely because they have poor social skills. New research turns this thinking on its head and offers a potential cure for loneliness.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

There is a new way scientists are thinking about loneliness and how to overcome it. Many studies over the years have found loneliness can have grave consequences. It doesn't just feel bad. It's bad for our physical health, too. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam joins us now. Hey there, Shankar.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.

CORNISH: So what's this new research into loneliness all about?

VEDANTAM: A number of experiments find, Audie, that when you bring people into a laboratory, people who are lonely are actually better at detecting social cues, reading expressions and being generally plugged into the social world than people who aren't lonely. I was speaking with Megan Knowles. She's a psychologist at Franklin & Marshall College. And she told me that she and her colleagues, Gale Lucas, Roy Baumeister and Wendi Gardner, were drawn to a paradox here.

MEGAN KNOWLES: Why are lonely individuals able to do this in a lab but unable to do it in a kind of real-world context - in an actual interaction? Why aren't they translating these skills into actual positive social interactions?

CORNISH: So, Shankar, what did they find out?

VEDANTAM: Well, Knowles gave me an analogy to help me think about the question, Audie. We often see the same thing happening in a different context in sports. Athletes, golfers - they can be excellent in practice, but they choke when it comes to performing what they know on a big stage. And from what we know about choking, we know that choking happens because you mister a skill, you know how to do something, but instead of just allowing yourself to perform, you start to over think what you already know how to do. Here's Knowles again.

KNOWLES: Thinking about what you're doing step-by-step-by-step actually ends up interfering and hindering their performance.

VEDANTAM: So Knowles asked is the same thing happening to lonely people in social interactions? They already have these skills. But instead of simply applying those skills, they over think what they know, and they end up not being able to perform what they know how to do.

She's just wrapped up a series of experiments to prove that this indeed is the case. When you tell lonely people you are testing their social skills, they choke. On the other hand, when you give them the very same test for social skills, but you say that you're measuring something else - you're measuring their mental ability - the lonely volunteers now do great. They actually outperform volunteers who are not lonely.

So Knowles concludes from this that many volunteers who describe themselves as lonely actually have the social skills inside them. It's just that when they're asked to perform these social skills, they behave like these athletes and golfers who are choking on the big stage.

CORNISH: And I understand that the researchers also attempted to help people overcome this. How did they go about doing that?

VEDANTAM: So Knowles knew that people choke because they're anxious. Lonely people are worried about failing, so they over think what they do. And that makes the problem worse. So Knowles decided to use a technique called psychological misattribution. She brought volunteers into a laboratory, and she gave them a drink. And she told them this drink was laced with very large amounts of caffeine. Now, in reality, the drink did not have any caffeine. But the volunteers believed that it did.

Now, the drink had no effect on volunteers who weren't lonely, but it made a big difference to the lonely volunteers. When they felt jittery, when they felt butterflies in their stomach about having their social skills put to the test, they now attributed their jittery feelings to the caffeine rather than their own anxiety. And now when they're given a test and told that it measures their social abilities, Knowles finds the lonely volunteers given the drink are less likely to choke. They actually end up performing better than the volunteers who aren't lonely.

CORNISH: So what about the real life application of this? How can someone who experiences social anxiety do this on their own?

VEDANTAM: Well, I suppose one thing you could do is if you know someone who's lonely - is you give them a drink laced with caffeine.

CORNISH: (Laughter) That's for a trick placebo, OK - other options?

VEDANTAM: You know, the truth is there are entire books on the subject of choking, Audie, but I think the value of the study is that it give us a starting point on how to diagnose a problem correctly. Lonely people might not need our advice on how to master social skills. They already have that knowledge.

CORNISH: That's NPR's Shankar Vedantam. He regularly reports on social science research. And you can follow him on Twitter at @hiddenbrain. Shankar, thanks so much for talking with us.

VEDANTAM: Happy to be here, Audie.

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New Research Finds Lonely People Have Superior Social Skills

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subscribe to Hidden Brain podcast Intuitively, many of us might think lonely people are lonely because they have poor social skills. New research turns this thinking on its head and offers a potential cure for loneliness. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: There is a new way scientists are thinking about loneliness and how to overcome it.

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Loneliness & Mortality / Time Magazine Article

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Loneliness & Mortality / Time Magazine Article

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Why Loneliness May Be the Next Big Public-Health Issue

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Loneliness kills. That's the conclusion of a new study on what could be the next big public-health issue, on par with obesity

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Over the next two months, The Atlantic will explore many different visions of the American dream, in stories, videos, and photo essays.

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

In 1961, right in the midst of the period Cullen described, Eleanor Roosevelt took to The Atlantic to voice this concern. In an essay called "What Has Happened to the American Dream?" the former First Lady wrote:

The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.

Proclamations of the dream's death haven't really let up. "The fact is, the American dream is dead," Donald Trump recently declared as he announced his bid for President. Alternet and Mic.com have dueling arrays of charts to show anyone who claims the dream is still alive. Here at The Atlantic, we've gone as far as to declare it dead in the South, at least. Four years ago, The Onion was actually on the scene reporting shortly after the official time of death.

Visions of a successful life in the U.S. and abroad
Read More

Yet the octogenarian dream has proven remarkably hard to kill off. Again and again, its death has been noted, and mourned. Politicians promise they'll revive it. (The second half of Donald Trump's quote: "The fact is, the American dream is dead-but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.") And yet somehow, a few years later, it turns out to have been alive enough to have its death proclaimed all over again.

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Over the next two months, The Atlantic will explore many different visions of the American dream, in stories, videos, and photo essays. In 1961, right in the midst of the period Cullen described, Eleanor Roosevelt took to The Atlantic to voice this concern. In an essay called "What Has Happened to the American Dream?"

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"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power." - John Steinbeck quotes from BrainyQuote.com

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To preserve our most cherished human bonds, we must push back against the idea of investment and return.