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Contents

December 15, 1966 • Volume 7, Number 10

LETTERS

Contributors

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist. His writings appeared in Politics, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He published several well-regarded books in a variety of fields—including city planning, Gestalt therapy, literary criticism, and politics—before Growing Up Absurd, cancelled by its original publisher and turned down by a number of other presses, was brought out by Random House in 1960.

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Edgar Z. Friedenberg (1927-2000) was an American social critic and scholar of education. His books include Coming of Age in America and Growth and Acquiescence.

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

Edmund R. Leach (1910–1989) was a British anthropologist. He is widely credited with introducing Anglophone readers to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Leach served as provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1966 until 1979; he was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975. A two-volume selection of his writings, The Essential Edmund Leach, was published by Yale University Press in 2001.

George Lichtheim (1912–1973) was a scholar of Marx and Marxism. Lichtheim was a regular contributor to The Review and a contributing editor of Commentary. His books include From Marx to Hegeland Europe in the Twentieth Century.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917–2009) was an Irish historian and politician. He was elected to the Irish parliament in 1969 and served as a Minister from 1973 until 1977. His works include States of Ireland, The Great Melody and Memoir: My Life and Themes.

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) was a British essayist, novelist and short story writer. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitorand as a literary critic forNew Statesman. In 1968 Pritchett was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; he was knighted in 1975. His body of work includes many collections of short stories, in addition to travelogues, reviews, literary biographies and novels.

Janet Adam Smith (1905–1999) was a Scottish writer and critic. Educated at Oxford, she worked as an editor at a number of literary publications, including The Listener, The Criterion and New Statesman. She also edited the Faber Book of Modern Verse and its companion volume, the Faber Book of Children’s Verse. An accomplished mountaineer, Smith wrote about her adventures in Mountain Holidays; her other books include Life Among the Scots and John Buchnan and His World.

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.