Contents

January 23, 1975 • Volume 21, Number 21 & 22

LETTERS

Contributors

Bernard Avishai, Adjunct Professor of Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, splits his time between Jerusalem and Wilmot, New Hampshire.

Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–1984) was a British historian.

Robert Craft is a conductor and writer. Craft’s close working friendship with Igor Stravinsky is the subject of his memoir, An Improbable Life. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival.

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) was an American economist. He taught economic history at the New School, where he was appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky moved to the United States when he was exiled from Russia in 1972. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech andTo Urania; his essay collections include Less Than One, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Watermark. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as US Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was a writer and teacher. Among his books are On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from Howells to Faulkner, and the memoirs A Walker in the Cityand New York Jew. In 1996, he received the first Lifetime Award in Literary Criticism from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Irvin Ehrenpreis (1920–1985) was the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia. In 1984 he received the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa for the final volume of his trilogy, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age.

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

Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) was Professor of English at Columbia. During his lifetime, Koch 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.

P.D. Medawar (1915–1987) was a British biologist whose research was fundamental to the development of tissue and organ transplants. Along with Frank Macfarlane Burnet, he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

William Shawcross is the author of several books on Cambodia. (December 1996)

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.

John Thompson is an English sociologist. He has published several studies of the media and communication in modern societies, including The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Mediaand Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age.

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

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