If I hadn't been a writer, I might not have been as conscious of my American-ness as I have been. But it is a subject... it is my subject as much as anything else. And particularly so in the books I wrote in the '90s. So I've been an American since 1933 in the '90s. But there in the '90s the nature of my American-ness – how I connect to America, what events I lived through have meant to me as an American – that all became prominent in my thinking, my imagining.  So once you've written books like American Pastoral and I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, you've done a lot of thinking about the country, almost as much as an historian might do.  Your... your end goal is different but you've contemplated the country and the country's impact on you in a way that you ordinarily wouldn't in a life devoted to engineering or dentistry or selling, you know.  Which isn't to say you're any less an American in that way, but you're not so highly conscious an American, necessarily.  So, yes, I have thought about the America I've lived through, for the sake of my... for the sake of my work.