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Contents

May 15, 1980 • Volume 27, Number 8

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His latest book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.


Martin Gardner (1914–2010) was a science writer and novelist. He was the author of The New Ambidextrous Universe, Fractal Music, Hypercards and More, The Night is Large and Visitors from Oz.

Michael Walzer is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and co-editor of Dissent. He is the author of Just and Unjust Wars. (March 2003)

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.

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.”


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.

John Weightman (1915–2004) was a critic and literary scholar. After working as a translator and announcer for the BBC French service, Weightman turned to the study of French literature. He taught at King’s College London and the University of London. His books include The Concept of the Avant-Gardeand The Cat Sat on the Mat: Language and the Absurd.

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Adjunct Professor at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is Diodorus Siculus: The Persian Wars to the Fall of Athens, Books 11–14.34 (480–401 BCE).
 (November 2012)

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.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover.

Claire Tomalin is the author of many biographies, among them Jane Austen: A Life and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. Her new book, Charles Dickens: A Life, will be published in October. (September 2011)

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.

Al Alvarez is the author of Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

James Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair.

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

Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born into a large, devoutly Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a surgeon and lecturer, and his mother had been a nurse. Moore left Ireland during World War II and in 1948 moved to Canada, where he worked for the Montreal Gazette, married his first wife, and began to write potboilers under various pen names, as he would continue to do throughout the 1950s. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955, now available as an NYRB Classic), said to have been rejected by a dozen publishers, was the first book Moore published under his own name, and it was followed by nineteen subsequent novels written in a broad range of modes and styles, from the realistic to the historical to the quasi-fantastical, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey, An Answer from Limbo, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, I Am Mary Dunne, Catholics, Black Robe, and The Statement. Three novels—Lies of Silence, Color of Blood, and The Magician’s Wife—were short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Great Victorian Collection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After adapting The Luck of Ginger Coffey for film in 1964, Moore moved to California to work on the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. He remained in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for some fifteen years. Shortly before his death, Moore wrote, “There are those stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled vast, varied and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home. I am one of those wanderers.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917–2007) was an American historian and social critic. He served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His Journals: 1952– 2000 were published in 2007.