Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

December 7, 1978 • Volume 25, Number 19

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of History in the Making.

Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) was an English historian. He taught British history at Oxford and Princeton.

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.

Irving Howe (1920–1993) was an American literary and social critic. His history of Eastern-European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, won the 1977 National Book Award in History.

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

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.


V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) was a British essayist, novelist and short story writer. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitorand as a literary critic forNew Statesman. In 1968 Pritchett was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; he was knighted in 1975. His body of work includes many collections of short stories, in addition to travelogues, reviews, literary biographies and novels.

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.

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of the American South. He taught at Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where he was named the Sterling Professor of History. His books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World.

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.

Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and now lives in Marrakesh. He is the author of many novels, including Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, and The Garden of Secrets, as well as two volumes of autobiography.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City, and his extraordinarily busy and fruitful life took him from civil-war Spain to surrealist Paris, from US universities to the Mexican embassy in New Delhi, where he served for six years as ambassador before resigning in protest after his government’s suppression of student demonstrations at the 1968 Olympic Games. A great poet, Paz was also the author of many essays and a study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, as well as the founder and editor of two important journals, Plural and Vuelta. Octavio Paz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955 he co-founded The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot’s Ghost; Oswald’s Tale; The Gospel According to the Son; and The Castle in the Forest.

William Styron (1925–2006) was the author of several novels, including Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

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.

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.