Contents

May 18, 1972 • Volume 18, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

Noel Annan (1916–2000) was a British military intelligence officer and scholar of European history. His works include Leslie Stephen and Our Age, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, and The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought.

Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at MIT.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of dozens of books, including Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing, Surrealism, and Surprised in Translation, and is the translator of, among many others, André Breton, René Char, Stéphane Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, Jacques Roubaud, and Ghérasim Luca.

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist and writer. Until recently, he was the Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. His many books include The Moral Intelligence of Children and Bruce Springsteen’s America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing. Coles received a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Children of Crisis, a MacArthur Award in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001.

Frances FitzGerald’s books include Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. (November 2008)

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. His novel Middle C was published in March 2013.

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.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and emigrated to England in 1950, when he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. He is the author of many novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. He has also written several nonfiction works based on his travels, including India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. He was knighted in 1990 and in 1993 was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) was an American writer and scholar of French culture. He taught at Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Boston University, where he was named University Professor. His books includeForbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was an English poet and essayist. As a young man, he became friends with W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood, a loose collection often referred to as “the Auden Group” or “MacSpaunday.” He published many collections of poems, including The Still Centre and Ruins and Visions, and numerous volumes of nonfiction and other works, including Learning Laughterand Love-Hate Relations.

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.

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) was a composer and critic. He collaborated extensively with Gertrude Stein, who wrote the libretti for his operas Four Saints in Three Actsand The Mother of Us All. In 1988 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.