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Contents

August 18, 1966 • Volume 7, Number 2

LETTERS

Contributors

W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was an English poet, playwright, and essayist who lived and worked in the United States for much of the second half of his life. His work, from his early strictly metered verse, and plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, to his later dense poems and penetrating essays, represents one of the major achievements of twentieth-century literature.

Anthony Quinton (1925–2010) was a British philosopher. Quinton served as president of Trinity College, Oxford and as chairman of the British Library. His works include The Nature of Things, Hume, and From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein.

Frederick C. Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at New York University, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. His works include The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and The American Classics.

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.

Francis Haskell (1928-2000) was an English art historian. His works include Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italyand History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. Haskell taught at Oxford.

Hans J. Morgenthau (1904–1980) was a legal scholar and theorist of international relations. Educated in Germany and Switzerland, Morgenthau taught for many years at the University of Chicago; later in life, he moved to The New School and The City University of New York. His books include In Defense of The National Interest, Politics Among Nations, and The Purpose of American Politics.

Martin Bernal is Professor Emeritus of Government at Cornell. His controversial study of Ancient Greece, Black Athena, explores the origins of Hellenic culture and, in particular, the influence of Egypt and Phoenicia on the development of Ancient Greece.

I.F. Stone (1907–1989) was an American journalist and publisher whose self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, challenged the conservatism of American journalism in the midcentury. A Noncomformist History of Our Times (1989) is a six-volume anthology of Stone’s writings.

Robert Penn Warren (1936–2011) was an American novelist, poet and critic. From 1944 until 1945 he served as Consultant in Poetry—the position would later become Poet Laureate—to the Library of Congress.

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) was a composer and critic. He collaborated extensively with Gertrude Stein, who wrote the libretti for his operas Four Saints in Three Actsand The Mother of Us All. In 1988 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.