A World Of His Own
Imagine, if you will, a small college town with a reputation for quirky and artistic residents—a magnet, of sorts, for creative types from all over the country. This is a place we’ll call “Yellow Springs, Ohio.” The year is 1946.
A young man—just out of the Army, just out of that terrible, inhuman experience called the Second World War—is ready to start his peacetime education. His name is Rodman Edward Serling, and he is ill.
His illness is not anything he can name. There isn’t even a word for it in his time except for that insufficient sobriquet—“Shell Shock.” In his darkest moments, the twenty-two year old Serling is still in New Guinea, or the Philippines, still jumping out of airplanes and into a storm of gunfire, a maelstrom of violence in his mind that no treaty, no victory, and no atom bomb can settle…