Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

October 18, 1973 • Volume 20, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997. For more information, see the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

Robert Craft was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival for 2002.(May 2002)

Stuart Hampshire, formerly Warden of Wardham College, Oxford, is the author of Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.(October 2002)

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.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at NYU, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. He is the author of The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and, most recently, The American Classics. (October 2006)

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. (June 2006)

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s many books include God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism and The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution. His Memoir: My Life and Themes will be published in the US in May. (December 2000)

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories, I, Etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and seven works of nonfiction, among them Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work; in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Gore Vidal’s most recent novel is The Golden Age. (February 2002)

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.

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.