Local author and activist Robert Nichols began his term as a Montgomery Fellow Monday. A resident of nearby Thetford, Vt., Nichols said he plans to share his unique worldview with the student body.
Born in Worcester, Mass., in 1919, Nichols remembers his childhood being shaped by Charles Lindbergh's first transatlantic flight in 1927.
"I remember going up to the attic, and being positioned in the window and told that Lindbergh's plane was coming back after he'd flown to Paris -- I do remember looking in the sky and seeing it fly back," Nichols said.
After serving in the Pacific during World War II, Nichols studied at the Harvard School of Design. Nichols said he chose to study landscape architecture because it fused design and the outdoors, but he soon became disenchanted with both the school and the profession.
"When you're at Harvard, or certainly Harvard graduate school, you assume they do great things. But I always suspected that sometimes they do terrible things," Nichols said.
With most of his work involving shopping malls and highways planning, Nichols began shifting his focus to the community. Living in New York City's Greenwich Village during the mid-1960s, Nichols designed community playgrounds and provided a safe haven for runaways.
"Everyone was coming to New York. All the kids were running away from their families, and they came to New York and they got lost," Nichols said. "They were living on the street, and I remember we took over an abandoned prison, and we would make dinner for a couple of hundred people out of a big can and just serve free meals."
Throughout the decades Nichols has been active in a variety of movements, from protesting against the Vietnam War to promoting conservation.
His most ambitious literary work is a critically acclaimed tetralogy documenting a modern utopian society. "Daily Lives in Nghsi Altai" chronicles the visit of four westerners to an eponymous country where every social and political structure is the opposite of the United States.
"I tried to stand every idea on its head that I could think of," Nichols said when asked about his goals for writing the series. "Because of the ferment of political interest, I got the idea that I should write a utopia because a utopia would give a picture of the world as it might be or as it might be in the future."
Nichols, however, is concerned that there is hardly any tradition of the political novel as literature in America. Politics is more often found in poetry and music in our country, Nichols said, adding that there seems to be a divide between political opinions and great literature.
"Imagination and ambiguity are censored out by people who want to make a political statement in their writing," Nichols said.
Nichols said he has bridged the gap between activism and literature in his own writing by challenging his readers to rethink their preconceived notions about the way the world functions.
During his time at Dartmouth, Nichols said he would like to discuss how political views and literature do not have to be mutually exclusive.
"I think that a lot of people are beginning to feel that they'd like to say something more overt politically, but there is a constraint because they're not going to get published," Nichols said. "That is really an interesting problem to talk about -- whether we solve it or not."
Nichols and his wife, author and poet Grace Paley, will both serve as Montgomery Fellows this term. Nichols said he is looking forward to the time he will spend with Dartmouth students.
"Grace and I are both optimists, we have a pretty positive view towards the world," Nichols said.
