America Observed provides, for the first time, a collection of Alistair Cooke's memorable dispatches to The Guardian written between 1946 and 1972, the year that he retired as the paper's chief American correspondent. Ronald Wells has selected over 50 interpretative peices that span the great range of Cooke's reporting: politics, literature, sport, vignettes of regional life, long-gone Presidents from Truman to Nixon, the racial turmoil of the 1960s and profiles of Americans as various as Frank Lloyd Wright and Garry Cooper, Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe. Alistair Cooke is best know for his weekly BBC broadcast Letter from America which is heard in 52 countries and is the longest-running radio series in broadcasting history. He is author of three collections: Talk About America, Letters from America and The Americans.