America had surprised Begley with its comparatively limitless freedom, he says, and Harvard even more so.

“It was wonderful, absolutely mind-boggling,” Begley says of first moving to Brooklyn. “Where shall I begin? It was the scenes of extraordinary plenty. Poland was a desert state, even France was a pretty grim place to be in 1947—dark shortages of everything, an immense kind of fatigue.

“And certainly to be in this country, where everything was abundant, where there had been no destruction, there were no bombed buildings. And of course, the contrast between the liberty of the kids in Brooklyn high schools and a boys’ Gymnasium in Poland. It was a century of difference,” Begley says.

Harvard then offered him the next level of freedom—relief from his parents.

Begley says that before college his independence was stifled by parents who, in rescuing him from the war in Poland, and educating him themselves, had entwined their day-to-day lives with his to the point of near suffocation.

“I have this memory of the phenomenal freedom because I had been sat upon by my parents, for perfectly understandable reasons, during the war,” he says. “My father was actually in Russia during the war so my mother actually had to sit on me to make sure I was safe.

“Then after the war they sat on me because I needed to do well in school...I think I was suffocating,” Begley says. Life at Harvard, then, was a “phenomenal business of being able to do exactly what you wanted and not having to do what you didn’t want to do.”

Left to his own devices, his first year in Thayer South was an eye-opening experience—even from the first day, when his roommate introduced him to the joy of bagpipes.

Begley joined the Advocate in his freshman year, and wrote both poetry and fiction. He has kept his ties to the organization, and serves now as chair of the Board of Trustees.

Yet he says that in college he didn’t consider a career in professional writing or criticism, and even dropped the one creative writing course in which he enrolled halfway through one semester.

“I had come to the conclusion that I had absolutely nothing to write about,” he says.

Many of Begley’s peers at the Advocate entertained vague literary ambitions. But according to James Chace ’53, a historian and writer who knew Begley from their time together on the magazine, classmates perceived that something was a bit different about Begley—an unusual maturity which they attributed to his European upbringing.

“Louis was very watchful, and he always spoke quietly. He was not particularly shy, but I could always see Louis observing things,” says Chace, who has remained close to Begley since graduation. Because Begley was new not only to Harvard but to the United States, he says, “I always sensed that Louis was observing a lot....He was very astute in his judgements.”

Chace says that Begley’s college writing demonstrated European “flavor,” and that the intensity and style of his stories set him apart from his fellow Advocate editors.

“Louis already had an extreme talent as a writer, which reflected his upbringing in Poland,” Chace says. “His experience and background was, of course, so different from ours.”