Harold Edmund Stearns was a prolific journalist and editor of the influential Civilization in the United States An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (1922), the book that inspired many dissatisfied young Americans to go abroad. When Stearns sailed for an extended stay in Europe on 4 July 1921, he was already known as a spokesman for the younger generation in America.

Stearns's father died shortly before his son's birth in Barre, Massachusetts. As a result Stearns's mother, a nurse, brought the boy up in straitened financial circumstances in several small New England towns. Stearns was determined to get an education, and his high school years were financed largely by his own ingenuity. In 1909, shortly before graduating from high school, Stearns began reviewing books for the Boston Evening Transcript, the beginning of a long and often successful career in journalism.

Surmounting formidable financial obstacles, Stearns entered Harvard in 1909 and finished the requirements for...