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Contents

December 4, 1969 • Volume 13, Number 10

LETTERS

Contributors

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at New York University, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. His works include The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and The American Classics.

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)

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the Thirties Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley’s best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist. His 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 books in a variety of fields—including city planning, Gestalt therapy, literary criticism, and politics—before Growing Up Absurd, cancelled by its original publisher and turned down by a number of other presses, was brought out by Random House in 1960.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977. The translation in this issue appears in Verses and Versions, a collection of Nabokov’s translations of three centuries of Russian poetry, published this month by Harcourt. (November 2008)

Charles Rycroft (1914–1998) was a British psychoanalyst and writer. His books include A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Anxiety and Neurosis, The Innocence of Dreams, and Psychoanalysis and Beyond.

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.

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.