excerpt from the book..In recent years American literature has been enriched by certainautobiographies of men and women who had been born abroad, but who hadbeen brought to this country, where they grew up as loyal citizens ofour great nation. Such assimilated Americans had to face not only theusual conditions confronting a stranger in a strange land, but had todevelop within themselves the noble conception of Americanism that waslater to become for them a flaming gospel. Andrew Carnegie, the cannyScotch lad who began as a cotton weaver's assistant, became a steelmagnate and an eminent constructive philanthropist. Jacob Riis, theambitious Dane, told in _The Making of an American_ the story of hisrise to prominence as a social and civic worker in New York. MaryAntin, who was brought from a Russian ghetto at the age of thirteen,gave us in _The Promised Land_ a most impressive interpretation ofAmerica's significance to the foreign-born. The very title of her bookwas a flash of inspiration.