Contents

July 13, 1967 • Volume 9, Number 1

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Nigel Dennis (1912–1989) was an English writer, critic and editor. His books include Boys and Girls Come Out to Play and An Essay on Malta.

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) was an Austrian art historian. Born in Vienna, Gombrich studied at the Theresianum and then at the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser. After graduating, he worked as a Research Assistant and collaborator with the museum curator and Freudian analyst Ernst Kris. He joined the Warburg Institute in London as a Research Assistant in 1936 and was named Director in 1959. His major works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art.

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.

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.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her political and social commentary, literary essays, and drama criticism appeared in magazines such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, and were collected in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 (1963), The Writing on the Wall (1970), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and Occasional Prose (1985). Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942), The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She was the author of three works of autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1987), and the unfinished Intellectual Memoirs (1992), and two travel books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). Her essays on the Vietnam War were collected in The Seventeenth Degree (1974); her essays on Watergate were collected in The Mask of State (1974).

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.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German political theorist who, over the course of many books, explored themes such as violence, revolution, and evil. Her major works include The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

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.

William Styron (1925–2006) was the author of several novels, including Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

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.

Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Philip Rahv (1908–1973) was an American literary critic. Rahv was a founding editor of Partisan Review. His works include Image and Idea and Literature and the Sixth Sense.

Andrew Kopkind (1935–1994) was a journalist and editor. Kopkind’s work chronicled the turbulence of the American sixties and seventies; he wrote on the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War era, and the rise of Ronald Regan in Time Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic, where he served as associate editor. An anthology of his work, The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, was published in 1995.

Jack Richardson (1934–2012) was a playwright, novelist and drama critic. His 1960 play, The Prodigal, a retelling of Euripides’ Orestes, won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award. Richardson wrote dramatic criticism for The New York Times, Esquire and Commentary and was a frequent contributor to The Review.

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) worked in publishing and at The Partisan Review before becoming editor of The New York Review of Books in 1963. She began her publishing career at Doubleday & Co., where she served as junior editor after graduating from Radcliffe College in 1949. She was born Barbara Zimmerman in Boston, Massachusetts.

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.

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.

J.H. Plumb (1911–2001) was a British historian. He taught at Cambridge and Columbia. Plumb was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968 and was knighted in 1982. His works include England in the Eighteenth Century, The Making of a Historian,and The American Experience.

Richard Wilbur’s book Mayflies: New Poems and Translations will be published in April. (November 2000)

Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) was an American historian.