Contents

December 13, 1973 • Volume 20, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Grace Paley is a writer and a teacher, a feminist and an activist. Her books include The Collected Stories; Just as I Thought, which gathers personal and political essays and articles; and Begin Again: Collected Poems. She lives in New York City and Vermont.

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

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence

Rose B. Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist. She is the author of By Vineyard Light, a collection of poems centered on Martha’s Vineyard, where she and her husband, writer William Styron, spent extended summers. Her other books include From Summer to Summer, Thieves’ Afternoon and Modern Russian Poetry.

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was an American novelist, essayist, and playwright. His many works include the memoirs Point to Point Navigation and Palimpsest, the novels The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge, and Lincoln, and the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992.

William H. Gass is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and emeritus professor of philosophy. His first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Since then he has published several more works of fiction, including In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The Tunnel, and Middle C. He has also published several collections of essays, including Fiction and the Figures of Life, Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, and Life Sentences. Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller and Solomon R. Guggenheim foundations, four Pushcart Prizes, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the American Book Award, and three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. In 2000, he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award.