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Originally published in 1970, Raymond Mungo's picaresque account of his adventures with Liberation News Service in the wild years of 1967 and 1968 has been variously described as youthful, passionate, lyrical, demented, and an iconic symbol of the sixties counterculture. A review in The Nation described it as “hip Huck Finn.”

A college editor at the height of the Vietnam War, Mungo found himself smack in the middle of a mad swirl of activism and dissent, vigorously protesting everything from the draft to abortion laws to the university itself. Then he connected with Marshall Bloom to cofound LNS in Washington, D.C., as a news service catering to the burgeoning underground press. One thing led to another, until LNS, like so many other radical organizations, eventually disintegrated into violently warring factions. Mungo's memoir tracks its development and destruction with wicked humor and literary panache.

In an introduction to this new edition, John McMillian discusses the enduring appeal of Famous Long Ago and situates it within its broader historical context, while the author provides his own retrospective take in a new afterword.

The search for belief and meaning among nineteenth-century intellectuals

The nineteenth century’s explosion of scientific theories and new technologies undermined many deep-seated beliefs that had long formed the basis of Western society, making it impossible for many to retain the unconditional faith of their forebears. A myriad of discoveries—including Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, Joule’s law of conservation of energy, Pasteur’s germ theory, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories of evolution by natural selection, and Planck’s work on quantum theory—shattered conventional understandings of the world that had been dictated by traditional religious teachings and philosophical systems for centuries.

Fictions of Certitude: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920 investigates the fin de siècle search for truth and meaning in a world that had been radically transformed. John S. Haller Jr. examines the moral and philosophical journeys of nine European and American intellectuals who sought deeper understanding amid such paradigmatic upheaval. Auguste Comte, John Henry Newman, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Fiske, William James, Lester Frank Ward, and Paul Carus all belonged to an age in which one world was passing while another world that was both astounding and threatening was rising to take its place.

For Haller, what makes the work of these nine thinkers worthy of examination is how they strove in different ways to find certitude and belief in the face of an epochal sea change. Some found ways to reconceptualize a world in which God and nature coexist. For others, the challenge was to discern meaning in a world in which no higher power or purpose can be found. As explained by D. H. Meyer, “The later Victo­rians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would.”
 

The ‘unbearable 80s’, as the last decade of the Ceauşescu era has been called in Romania, are in the focus of this quasi-autobiographical work. The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive regime and provides a stark depiction of a man’s intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule.