Politics & Power Quote by Anatole Broyard

American writers, Broyard suggests, are professional escape artists who turn around mid-flight to write love letters to the very rooms they bolted from. The line lands because it names a national literary tic without romanticizing it: nostalgia here isn’t innocence, it’s craft. The “paradox” isn’t just emotional inconsistency; it’s a narrative engine. You can’t build a myth of self-invention without a past to push against, and you can’t sell the drama of leaving without later making the lost place glow.

Broyard’s critic’s eye catches how American literature converts restlessness into sentiment. Our canonical stories prize departure - the road, the city, the frontier, the blank page - yet they keep smuggling the old neighborhood back in as origin story, moral yardstick, or wound. The subtext is almost accusatory: nostalgia becomes a kind of aesthetic laundering, turning hardship into “texture,” family pressure into “character,” small-town suffocation into “roots.” Writers “forever looking back” implies not one tender glance but a compulsion, a feedback loop where distance makes the past legible and therefore marketable.

Context matters: Broyard, a mid-century critic with a talent for surgical aphorism, is speaking from inside a culture that canonized the breakaway plot while lionizing authenticity. Many American writers left literal provinces for metropolitan publishing centers, then recast that exit as both liberation and loss. His sentence exposes the hustle underneath the hymn: we flee to become ourselves, then reclaim what we fled to prove we had a self to begin with.