America
Fairlie was an anomaly in Washington, a Tory whose unique brand of conservatism frequently left him more sympathetic to the Democrats than the Republicans. These heterodox politics helped him find a perch at The New Republic, where he was a regular contributor from the mid-1970s until his death in 1990. In the mid-1980s, when he was unable to keep up payments on his apartment, he was even reduced to living in his office there, sleeping on a couch next to his desk.
Fairlie devoted much of the second half of his career to trying to explain America to Americans. Between 1976 and 1982, he wrote "Fairlie at Large," a bi-weekly column for The Washington Post. In those pieces he often abandoned political subjects to write about American manners and morals: for instance, why Americans would do well to give up showers in favor of more contemplative baths. His romantic attachment to the possibilities of American life found its fullest expression in a long essay titled "Why I Love America," which The New Republic published on July 4, 1983.
In the winter of 1990, Fairlie fell in the lobby of The New Republic, breaking a hip. After a brief hospitalization, he died on February 25. His ashes were buried in the family plot in Scotland.
Read more about this topic: Henry Fairlie
Famous quotes containing the word america:
“To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box.... On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“I don’t see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.”
—Jacques Maritain (1882–1973)
“A government deriving its energy from the will of the society, and operating, by the reason of its measures, on the understanding and interest of the society ... is the government for which philosophy has been searching and humanity been fighting from the most remote ages ... which it is the glory of America to have invented, and her unrivalled happiness to possess.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)