Contents

November 25, 1976 • Volume 23, Number 19

LETTERS

Contributors

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His most recent book is Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, published in September. (December 2012)

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.

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.

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of US History Emeritus at Stanford. His recent books include Racism: A Short History and Not Just Black and White, a collection co-edited with Nancy Foner.

Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, was the author of seventeen books of fiction. He died in 2005. (November 2011)

Jean Daniel founded Le Nouvel Observateur, for which he remains the principal commentator. He has published over twenty books. (December 2011)

Günter Grass, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a novelist, poet, playwright, sculptor, and artist. (April 2012)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a hugely influential French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and pamphleteer. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among his most well-known works available in English are Nausea, Being and Nothingness, No Exit, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Words.

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.

Christopher Hill (1912–2003) was an English historian. Educated at Oxford, Hill taught at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire as well as Oxford, where he was elected Master of Balliol College. His books include Puritanism and Revolution,Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, and The World Turned Upside Down.

Diane Johnson is a novelist and critic. Her books include Lulu in Marrakechand Le Divorce. Her new book, Flyover Lives, will be published in January 2014.

Leonard Schapiro was a British political scientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on Soviet politics. His works include The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Russian Studies; he also translated Turgenev’s novel Spring Torrentsinto English.

Robert Towers (1923–1995) was an American critic and novelist. Born in Virginia, Towers was educated at Princeton and served for two years as Vice Counsel at the American Consulate General in Calcutta before dedicating himself to literary studies. He taught English literature and creative writing at Princeton, Queens College and Columbia.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


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.

Nicholas von Hoffman is a columnist for The Huffington Post.

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.

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.