Gone Looking for America

This story explores a young man’s quest to get away from the confines of his lonely childhood in a small, rural town in North Carolina to see the greater world, a world in his mind that was bound to be a better place. This imagined locale would have many more interesting things to do, engaging people to meet, and a way of life superior to anything he had ever known in his limited experience.

Naïve and impressionable Charles Malone takes on the big new universe of Washington, D.C., the seat of American power, when he gets a surprise appointment to be a summer intern in the office of United States Senator Sam Ervin, Jr.

Awestruck and innocent, yet at the same time ambitious and adventurous, Charles navigates the mayhem of sometimes-dangerous D.C. neighborhoods and the intrigues of Capitol Hill during the tumultuous summer of 1968, when the social and political drama had rarely been more intense. The text is sprinkled with his fortuitous encounters with a variety of American icons.

Woven into the narrative are his experiences as a busboy living on Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, as a wayward college student, and as a reluctant draftee into the U. S. Army with consequent service in Vietnam.

This is the classic coming-of-age narrative long embodied in America’s “revolt from the village” genre of literature. In his rambles, blunders, narrow escapes, and triumphs, young Charles displays the basic good nature and kind heart that lead to self-realization. The grass is greener, he finds, where one waters it.

The book is a companion volume to Malone’s earlier memoir of his Vietnam experience, Fire to Light.