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Contents

June 1, 1963 • Volume 1, Number 2

LETTERS

Contributors

Benjamin Demott is Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst. His most recent book is Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind. (May 2005)

Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford. He is the author of Dostoyevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. (June 2008)

Anthony Hecht’sCollected Later Poems and Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry were published in 2003. He died on October 20. (December 2004)

Alfred Kazin’s most recent book is God and the American Writer. (April 1998)

John Lukacs was born in Budapest in 1924. He has written twenty-five works of history and criticism, including Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture; Historical Consciousness: Or, The Remembered Past; The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler; and, most recently, George Kennan: A Study of Character.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.

J. F. Powers (1917-1999) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and studied at Northwestern University while holding a variety of jobs in Chicago and working on his writing. He published his first stories in The Catholic Worker and, as a pacifist, spent thirteen months in prison during World War II. Powers was the author of three collections of short stories and two novels—Morte D’Urban, which won the National Book Award, and Wheat That Springeth Green—all of which have been reissued by New York Review Books. He lived in Ireland and the United States and taught for many years at St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the author of numerous books on American history, served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He died this year. His Journals: 1952– 2000, from which an excerpt appears in this issue, will be published in October by Penguin. (October 2007)

C. Vann Woodward is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His many books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World. (February 1998)

Richard Wilbur’s book Mayflies: New Poems and Translations will be published in April. (November 2000)

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.

Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was born in New York City and educated at Exeter and Yale. On graduating from college, he enrolled in Macy’s executive training program, but soon left to work for Henry Luce at Time and Fortune, quitting in 1936 because of cuts that had been made to an article he had written criticizing U.S. Steel. From 1937 to 1943, Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review and in 1944, he started a journal of his own, Politics, whose contributors included Albert Camus, Victor Serge, Simone Weil, Bruno Bettelheim, James Agee, John Berryman, Meyer Schapiro, and Mary McCarthy. In later years, Macdonald reviewed books for The New Yorker, movies for Esquire, and wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books.