What would you do with $2.72?
If you’re John Edwin Mroz, you think big.
At 18, Mroz was given the title ‘literary festival chairman’ at Notre Dame. A freshman at the time, he was also given the bank account associated with the festival budget. When he checked the balance, there it was: $2.72.
One year later, Mroz and his team of fellow sophomores brought Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Wright Morris and Granville HIcks to campus for a week-long literary festival. It just so happens that this week (March 31 to April 6, 1968) was one of the most chaotic in American history.
One Week in America was released on March 2, 2021 by Chicago Review Press. You can buy a copy through their website, or at Amazon, among others.
"Masterfully researched and beautifully written, One Week in America is . . . an important piece of history full of larger-than-life characters and unlikely heroes." —Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life
"Patrick Parr perfectly captures a unique moment in American history, when a motley group of college kids convinced America's leading literary lights to come together for one memorable week in 1968. You'll wonder if it really happened, but it did, and One Week in America rescues this incredible story from obscurity." —Matthew Algeo, author of All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy's 1968 Tour of Appalachia
"In One Week in America, Patrick Parr has written a wonderfully nuanced and essential cultural history. By closely examining the Symposium of Great American Writers at Notre Dame, which took place amid one of the most eventful, tragic weeks in our history, Parr illuminates that time in unexpected and fascinating ways. I tore through this book of conflicting personalities and ideas, and can't recommend it more highly." —Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others
"One Week in America is an engaging, multidimensional snapshot of US society in 1968. It's certainly a useful resource if you wish to research the civil rights movement, antiwar activism, and the literary scene in America in the '60's. It's also fascinating to the general reader interested in modern history, presented from many angles." —PopMatters
"An inherently fascinating bit of American cultural history." —Midwest Book Review
