In his memoir A Political Education, publisher André Schiffrin writes that as an eager boy in New York City in the 1940s, he'd walk to 86^th and Lexington every Saturday night to get all the Sunday papers with comic supplements. He'd take the stack to an old fashioned soda-fountain parlor, where he'd have an ice cream sundae, "complete with whipped cream, almonds and a cherry."

The developments between Schiffrin's time as a consumer of Sunday funnies and the beginning of his career as a publisher of important authors make up much of A Political Education. His newsstand patronage would soon shift from comics suppliers on 86^th Street to a "well-stocked kiosk on Forty-second Street," which may have been the last remaining New York newsstand where he could buy papers produced by the fading leftist press. Schiffrin captures the shifting political climate in the United States, as old-school democratic socialism faded, and the progressive movement was reborn through the 1960s counterculture in which Schiffrin played a prominent role.

The 1948 election was important to him, marking the first time he took an active interest in a presidential campaign, and the last time a "wide range of choices across the political spectrum" was available to voters. Democrats were divided three ways between incumbent Truman, racist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (who would later become a very conservative Republican), and the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace, deemed by a young Schiffrin to be "too pro-communist." Imagine a serious candidate just ten years later having even a hint of pro-communist leanings, and you get a sense of how different mainstream politics must have been during the first half of the twentieth century. The race even had a socialist in the running, although his candidacy was mostly symbolic.

Schiffrin's parents appreciated his interest in American politics, but were afraid that he was drifting too far from his Gallic origins. They made sure that he spent time in France, where he lived with a family friend, prominent author André Gide. In a letter from Schiffrin’s father to Gide, we get a snapshot of our author as a young man: a boy interested primarily in collecting stamps and following politics, "who takes in an enormous quantity of newspapers, magazines, all sorts of political books. He listens to the radio. Better informed about current affairs, both foreign and domestic, than your average Congressman. Never bored. Likes being by himself and clearly prefers the company of adults."

Schiffrin’s dual nationality is a big part of his identity, giving him the perspective of an outsider while he has some of the passion and optimism of a skeptical patriot. Some time after his Saturday evening comics pilgrimages, his interests would shift in becoming an early champion of the political writings of Noam Chomsky (known at the time primarily as a linguist) and philosopher Michel Foucault. As an editor at Pantheon, he'd also publish Art Spiegelman's seminal comic Maus, remaining true to his boyhood interests born both at the comics and leftist newsstands of New York.

Nathan Gelgud is an illustrator who lives in Brooklyn.