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Contents

December 30, 1971 • Volume 17, Number 11

LETTERS

Contributors

John Bayley has written two books about his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends. (July 2004)

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.

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)

Alfred Kazin’s most recent book is God and the American Writer. (April 1998)