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Contents

January 28, 1965 • Volume 3, Number 12

LETTERS

Contributors

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the Thirties Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley’s best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.

Frank Kermode lives in Cambridge, England. His latest book, Concerning E.M. Forster, was published in December. (July 2010)

John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso, Volume Three, was published in 2007. Volume One won the Whitbread Prize in England in 1991. He is currently at work on Volume Four. (November 2010)

Peter Gay is Director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He wrote Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914.

Christopher Ricks teaches at Boston University and is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s many books include God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism and The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution. His Memoir: My Life and Themes will be published in the US in May. (December 2000)

Robert Lowell died in 1977. His Collected Poems was published this summer. The letters in this issue will be included in The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton, to be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. (November 2003)