Dear TIME-Reader:

AS Europe turns a corner in its post-war history, what does its youth think of the future? To find out what the younger generation of the Continent's most articulate country thinks, TIME'S editors sent Correspondent Stanley Karnow ranging from Paris up and down France. Karnow talked with young people of all kinds: Communists, Socialists, Catholics, city boys, country boys, students, workers and peasants. And he talked to them in their own language.

Brooklyn-born Karnow set sail for Europe aboard a coal freighter a week after his graduation from Harvard in 1947. Since then, he has returned to the U.S. only for short visits. Karnow studied French at the Sorbonne and European politics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris. Afterwards he did welfare work and freelance writing before he joined TIME'S Paris Bureau in 1951. A U.S. expatriate who loves France, Karnow listened, week after week, as young Frenchmen and Frenchwomen indicted not only their elders but their ancestors.

Correspondent Karnow listened carefully to all, and recorded his impressions for this week's special report on France: The Younger Generation.

AS he finished editing Carl Solberg's fine takeout on the late great Welsh Poet DYLAN THOMAS (see BOOKS), Senior Editor Henry Anatole Grunwald recalled a small chapter of the Thomas legend: once the poet had wanted to write for TIME. In 1945 Thomas asked U.S. Poet-Critic OSCAR WILLIAMS: "Could you approach TIME -- whom you suggested as possible employers -- and get some definite promise, however small, from them?" Unfortunately, Thomas postponed his trip to America five years and never came to TIME.

SINCE he took up trompe-l'oeil (fool -the -eye) painting (TIME, Dec.

6), Artist AARON BOHROD, who painted this week's cover picture of GOVERNOR GOODWIN J.

KNIGHT, has sometimes used small self-portraits as part of his signature.

On the California redwood background of the Knight cover, Bohrod painted his incised signature under another tiny self-portrait. Said he, with a chuckle: "I've always wanted to have my face on the cover of TIME, so I sneaked it in through the back door." Cordially yours,

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