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Contents

August 1, 1968 • Volume 11, Number 2

LETTERS

Contributors

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.”

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.


Amos Elon (1926–2009) was an Israeli journalist. His final book was The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews In Germany 1743 – 1933.

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.

William H. Gass is an American writer, critic and philosopher. He is the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at the Washington University in St. Louis.

Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009) was a British philosopher. First outlined in The Uses of Argument, his model for analyzing arguments has had a lasting influence on fields as diverse as law, computer science and communications theory. Toulmin’s other works include The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning and Return to Reason.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bernard Knox (1914–2010) was an English classicist. He was the first director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Mark Strand teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His new book of poems, Almost Invisible, will be published in January. (November 2011)

John Thompson is an English sociologist. He has published several studies of the media and communication in modern societies, including The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Mediaand Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age.

C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of the American South. He taught at Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where he was named the Sterling Professor of History. His books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World.