In the 1940s, as an émigré in America, Nabokov would stress the connection between American and English liberal democracy and the aspirations of the short-lived Russian provisional government. In 1942 he declared: "Democracy is humanity at its best ... it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself." During the 1960s, in both letters and interviews, he reveals a profound contempt for the New Left movements, describing the protesters as "conformists" and "goofy hoodlums." In a 1967 interview, Nabokov stated that he refused to associate with supporters of Bolshevism or Tsarist autocracy but that he had "friends among intellectual constitutional monarchists as well as among intellectual social revolutionaries." Nabokov supported the Vietnam War effort and voiced admiration for both Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Racism against African-Americans appalled Nabokov, who touted Pushkin's multiracial background as an argument against segregation. In his religious views, Nabokov was an agnostic. Nabokov was a notorious, lifelong insomniac who admitted unease at the prospect of sleep, famously stating that "the night is always a giant". His insomnia contributed to an enlarged prostate later in life, which only exacerbated his sleeplessness. Nabokov called sleep a "moronic fraternity", "mental torture", and a "nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius". Insomnia's impact on his work was widely explored and in 2017 Princeton University Press published a compilation of his dream diary entries, "Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov". Nabokov's wife Véra was his strongest supporter and assisted him throughout his lifetime, but Nabokov admitted to having a "prejudice" against women writers. He wrote to Edmund Wilson, who had been making suggestions for his lectures: "I dislike Jane Austen, and am prejudiced, in fact against all women writers. They are in another class." But after rereading Austen's "Mansfield Park" he changed his mind and taught it in his literature course; he also praised Mary McCarthy's work. Although Véra worked as his personal translator and secretary, he made publicly known that his ideal translator would be male, and especially not a "Russian-born female". In the first chapter of "Glory" he attributes the protagonist's similar prejudice to the impressions made by children's writers like Lidiya Charski, and in the short story "The Admiralty Spire" deplores the posturing, snobbery, antisemitism, and cutesiness he considered characteristic of Russian women authors.