Contents

April 2, 1981 • Volume 28, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was born in New York City and educated at Exeter and Yale. On graduating from college, he enrolled in Macy’s executive training program, but soon left to work for Henry Luce at Time and Fortune, quitting in 1936 because of cuts that had been made to an article he had written criticizing U.S. Steel. From 1937 to 1943, Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review and in 1944, he started a journal of his own, Politics, whose contributors included Albert Camus, Victor Serge, Simone Weil, Bruno Bettelheim, James Agee, John Berryman, Meyer Schapiro, and Mary McCarthy. In later years, Macdonald reviewed books for The New Yorker, movies for Esquire, and wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books.

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)

John Weightman, Professor Emeritus of the University of London, is the author of The Concept of the Avant-Garde. He will soon publish The Cat Sat on the Mat: Language and the Absurd. (October 2002)

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)

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. (November 2011)

Martin Gardner is the author of The New Ambidextrous Universe, Fractal Music, Hypercards and More, and The Night is Large. His most recent book is a novel, Visitors from Oz. (September 1998)