serial column vs. explicit sequence question

I'm having a problem and there seems to be 2 solutions. It is simple and
straighforward, but will take several paragraphs to explain.

I have a schema with a master-detail design. The master table does not have
an expicit id, so I have a column of type serial.

Lets say I need to insert a row into the master table and N rows into the
detail table. After inserting a row into master, and before detail, I need to
read the master table to obtain the value of the id for the row just
inserted, so I can insert this id as the foreign key value for the N rows in
the detail table.

This seems like a poor solution because I have to write and then read the
master table each time. With lot of activity on these tables, I don't know
how well this will scale. Additionally, the only way that I can guarantee
that I am getting the id of the most recent row inserted into master is to
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE --- because otherwise, if other
processes are inserting rows into master/detail concurrently, I may pick up
the id from an incorrect row (the technique used to get the correct id is to
include a timestamp column on the insert into master and then query for the
latest row).

A better solution would seem to use a sequence explicitly, rather than a id
column of type serial. I would obtain the id value from the sequence, and
then insert this id into the master table and into the detail table. This
way, I wouldn't be writing/reading the same table constantly -- I would only
be writing to it, and, I would guarantee that I would be using the correct id
in both master and detail without have to SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL
SERIALIZEABLE.

Any comments on which solution you would choose, or is there a better
solution ?

Thanks,
Charlie