Hightower's mother died two years later in 1917, prompting his father to return home to Salida, Colorado to take up a position as school superintendent.
Hightower lost interest in his Philology classes at Heidelberg and spent time in Belgium and Paris, where he briefly attended the Sorbonne and met James Joyce, before returning to the US in autumn 1937.
While at Harvard, Hightower had met and begun courting Florence "Bunny" Cole, a friend of Jean Stafford, and the two were married shortly before leaving for China.
Bunny became pregnant in 1941 and returned to the US, but Hightower remained until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when all American and British nationals in Japanese-controlled China were put under house arrest for two years before being sent to an internment camp in Shandong Province in 1943.
After several tense months, Hightower was freed in a Japanese-American prisoner exchange and returned to the United States, having smuggled out his dissertation hidden inside the walls of a large thermos.