"The baby boomers had arrived in college, and everyone thought we were the most interesting generation who ever lived. We thought we invented rock and roll, and people were greatly mythologized," English Professor Jay Cantor said.
"This led to grave errors," he continued, "but it was a great time. I hope you can have as much fun as we did, but you probably won't. The danger of the 1960s is that people keep repeating it. You can really remain trapped in the '60s with the intensity of the pleasures of the decade."
Cantor, a critically-lauded novelist, graduated from Harvard in 1970.
"I always knew I wanted to be a fiction writer and teach literature," Cantor said. "But I went to college thinking I was going to be a doctor and a writer."
In the end, however, science was not his calling: "In my freshman-year biology class, the lab assistant told me that if I kept going the way I was, I was going to be carrying a gun."
In other words, Cantor would fail out of college and lose his deferment papers if he continued on the pre-med path.
He made the decision to follow the path of a novelist instead - and it's a path that has treated him well. Cantor has written two books of essays, "The Space Between: Literature and Politics" and "On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother." He has also written three novels, "The Death of Che Guevara," "Krazy Kat" and his most recent novel, "Great Neck," which is named after the town where Cantor was raised in Long Island, New York.
"Nothing in my books is autobiographical, but experiences from my background have definitely influenced my writing," he said.
One such experience was Cantor's active participation in the anti-war movement during his undergraduate education at Harvard.
"The main part of my college experience was the anti-war movement. I was caught up in it. I felt part of a community," he said.
This experience had a profound effect on Cantor's writing, which became much more politically and socially conscious during his college years.
As a member of Students for a Democratic Society, he served as a poster maker and propagandist against the Vietnam War.
"We actively were trying to stop the slaughter," Cantor said. "Our aim was to try and stop being good Germans - Germans were led by Hitler into everything."
As an English major and editor at Harvard's daily newspaper the Crimson, Cantor was always conscious of the way that journalism, politics and literature are interconnected.
"Journalists and writers need to read an enormous amount. They need the time to read all of this material and talk about what they are writing," he explained. "Because of the time we were writing in, everything we wrote was discussed on campus. You wrote an article or an editorial and it seemed as though everyone was reading your work and had an opinion on it.
"Everything occurring within current events then seemed relevant when many people felt like the government was trying to kill us," he added.
Unlike many English majors, Cantor was never worried about his job prospects. He always assumed he would be a professor, and the country was prosperous during his undergraduate years, making him optimistic.
Cantor has some advice for aspiring writers: "Write and never stop. The pen should never stop. You say you want to be a writer because you like to put words together. You have to enjoy the details," Cantor said.
"If you feel that the world is more alive when you write, then be a writer," he added. "If you feel the world is more alive in anything that you do, that is what you should do.
"I love to teach and I work hard at it. I always knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to write," Cantor said.
"Hemingway was a journalist first. I worked as a journalist for a short time at the Providence Journal, but it wasn't what I wanted to do - I wanted to write fiction," he added.
"But before you tell stories about fiction, you have to know fiction, and so I studied English," he said, adding, "Thank God there are doctors, though."
