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Contents

November 3, 1966 • Volume 7, Number 7

LETTERS

Contributors

D. J. Enright’s books include The Alluring Problem, Fields of Vision, Collected Poems 1948—1998, and, most recently, Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book. (August 2000)

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist, whose 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 but little-known books in a variety of fields—including city planning, Gestalt therapy, educational reform, literary criticism, and politics—before Growing Up Absurd, cancelled by its original publisher and turned down by a further eighteen, was brought out by Random House in 1960 and became an instant bestseller. Its author became an influential leader of the New Left and anti-war movements and a model for a new generation of critics like Susan Sontag, who wrote: “There is no living American writer for whom I have left the same simple curiosity to read as quickly as possible anything he wrote on any subject.” “Paul Goodman Changed My Life,” a 2011 documentary directed by Jonathan Lee and distributed by Zeitgeist Films, continues to play at film festivals and independent cinemas. The film received excellent reviews in such publications as The New York Times, Variety, The New York Post, Village Voice, and Time Out New York.

John Gross’s most recent book is A Double Thread, a memoir. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Parodies, which will be published in September. (April 2010)

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.

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)

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.