This document, which is described by its author as a "critical autobiography", traces one adult educator's 15-year journey from graduate school and into the field of adult literacy and the process of his development into what he calls "an American scholar." The autobiographical narrative is developed against the backdrop of the tension stemming from the opposing viewpoints and objectives of humanistic and social scholarship on the one hand and the more pragmatic institutions of modern life and work on the other hand. The specific topics discussed are as follows: (1) education and work as ambivalent pathways to identity in modern America (the life of the mind versus the world of action); (2) the author's experiences in graduate school in the 1980s (the quest for personal knowledge and the academy; status anxiety; the general exams for a doctoral degree); (3) practice in search of theory (existential angst; teaching; contract cleaning management; academic pursuits); (4) toward praxis and continuing tensions (entering the field of adult literacy; scholarly pursuits revisited; organizational change agent; discovering the field of literacy education; and practitioner/research dualism revisited). (Contains 74 references.) (MN)