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Contents

February 15, 1968 • Volume 10, Number 3

LETTERS

Contributors

Stuart Hampshire, formerly Warden of Wardham College, Oxford, is the author of Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.(October 2002)

Francis Haskell, formerly Professor of Art History at Oxford, is the author of Patrons and Painters, Rediscoveries in Art, Past and Present in Art and Taste, and History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. (February 1999)

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s many books include God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism and The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution. His Memoir: My Life and Themes will be published in the US in May. (December 2000)

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy. (June 2006)

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.

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.

Leo Marx is the Kenan Professor of American Cultural History (Emeritus) at MIT and most recently the editor, with Bruce Mazlish, of Progress:Fact or Illusion? (July 1999)

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)