Contents

October 10, 1968 • Volume 11, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky moved to the United States when he was exiled from Russia in 1972. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech andTo Urania; his essay collections include Less Than One, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Watermark. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as US Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

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.

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

Edmund R. Leach (1910–1989) was a British anthropologist. He is widely credited with introducing Anglophone readers to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Leach served as provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1966 until 1979; he was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975. A two-volume selection of his writings, The Essential Edmund Leach, was published by Yale University Press in 2001.

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)

P.D. Medawar (1915–1987) was a British biologist whose research was fundamental to the development of tissue and organ transplants. Along with Frank Macfarlane Burnet, he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) was an English historian. He taught British history at Oxford and Princeton.

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.

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) was a British diplomatic historian.

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.