Contents

September 8, 1966 • Volume 7, Number 3

LETTERS

Contributors

Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, was the author of seventeen books of fiction. He died in 2005. (November 2011)

Irving Howe (1920–1993) was an American literary and social critic. His history of Eastern-European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, won the 1977 National Book Award in History.

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and The Dolphin are among his many volumes of verse. He was confounder of and contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Robert Brustein is a playwright, director, critic, teacher, and founder of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theatres. His play The Last Will opens in New York in April at Abingdon’s June Havoc Theater, and then goes to the Wuzhen Festival in China. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. (April 2013)

Robert B. Silvers is editor of The New York Review of Books. Prior to joining the Review, Mr. Silvers was, from 1959 to 1963, associate editor of Harper’s magazine, editor of the book Writing in America and translator of La Gangrène. Before that, Mr. Silvers lived in Paris for six years (1952 to 1958), where he served with the U.S. Army at SHAPE Headquarters and attended the Sorbonne and École des Sciences Politiques. He joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 and became Paris editor in 1956. He also worked as press secretary to Governor Chester Bowles in 1950. Mr. Silvers, who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947, was born in Mineola, New York.

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.

Noel Annan (1916–2000) was a British military intelligence officer and scholar of European history. His works include Leslie Stephen and Our Age, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, and The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought.

Marius Bewley (1916–1973) was a British-American literary critic. Educated at Cambridge, Bewley taught English literature at Rutgers and was an advisory editor atThe Hudson Review.

Theodore H. Draper (1912–2006) was an American historian. Educated at City College, he wrote influential studies of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association.

Richard Ellmann (1918–1987) was an American critic and biographer. He taught at Northwestern, Oxford and Emory, where he was named Robert W. Professor in 1980. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joycein 1959; a revised edition was awarded the James Tate Black Memorial Prize in 1982.

D.J. Enright (1920–2002) was a British poet, novelist and critic. He held teaching positions in Egypt, Japan, Thailand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. In 1981 Enright was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Robert Mazzocco is an American poet and critic.

James Merrill (1926–1995) was an American poet whose major work The Changing Light at Sandover describes a series of spirit communications conducted over many years. He won the National Book Award from his collections Nights and Days and Mirabell: Books of Number.

Meyer Schapiro, who died in 1996, taught for many years at Columbia. He was one of the most influential art historians of the last century and a contributor to The New York Review. Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, in which the letters in this issue appear, will be published in January by Getty. (December 2008)