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Contents

November 30, 1972 • Volume 19, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

Noel Annan is the author of Leslie Stephen and Our Age, among other books. (October 1999)

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. (November 2011)

W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was born in North Yorkshire, England, the son of a doctor. He studied at Oxford and published his first book, Poems, in 1930, immediately establishing himself as one of the outstanding voices of his generation. Auden emigrated to New York in 1939, where he became a US citizen and converted to Anglicanism. He wrote essays, critical studies, plays, and opera librettos for such composers as Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Hans Werner Henze, as well as the poems for which he is most famous.

Harold Cruse (1916-2005) was born in Petersburg, Virginia, the son of a railway porter. He was raised from a young age in New York City, where he attended high school, after which he served with the Army in Europe during World War II. Cruse attended the City College of New York, although he did not graduate, and was a member of the Communist Party for several years. He also wrote a number of plays and, in the 1960s, was co-founder with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) of the Black Arts Theater and School in Harlem. After publishing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967, Cruse was invited to lecture at the University of Michigan, where he taught in the African-American studies program until his retirement as professor emeritus in the mid-1980s. Harold Cruse was also the author of Rebellion or Revolution?, Plural But Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America’s Plural Society, and The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader.

Theodore Draper’s books include The Roots of American Communism and A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. He is at work on a book about the nineteenth century in the US. (September 1999)

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

James Merrill died in 1995. The poem in this issue appears in Last Poems, a collection of previously unpublished work, just published by Thornwillow Press. (December 1998)

Kenneth Koch died on July 6, 2002. He was Professor of English at Columbia. During his lifetime, he published at least thirty volumes of poetry and plays. He was also the author of a novel, The Red Robins; two books on teaching poetry writing to children, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home. A new collection of his poetry, A Possible World, and Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–54, will be published this fall. (August 2002)

I.F. Stone was an American journalist, publisher of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and a regular contributor to the Review. For more about him please visit www.ifstone.org.

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His latest book is The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. (December 2009)