Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

August 13, 1981 • Volume 28, Number 13

LETTERS

Contributors

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

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was a Canadian economist and politician. He taught at Princeton and Harvard. His works include The Affluent Society, The Age of Uncertainty and Economics and the Public Purpose. Galbraith’s many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Lomonosov Gold Medal, the Order of Canada, and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award.

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.

Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004) was an English philosopher. He taught at University College London, Princeton, Stanford and Oxford, where he was named Warden of Wadham College. His books include Thought and Action, Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.

Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996) was a writer and ballet critic. In 1946, together with George Balanchine, Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, which would soon be renamed The New York City Ballet. In 1984 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Roger Sale is a critic and journalist. Until 1999, he was Professor of English at the University of Washington. His books include Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson and J.R.R. Tolkien and On Not Being Good Enough: Writings of a Working Critic.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

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.

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

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.

James Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair.

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.

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

Jonathan Spence is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Death of Woman Wang, Treason by the Book, The Question of Hu, and The Search for Modern China.

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

E.L. Doctorow is the author most recently of All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, which appeared last year. His essay in this issue will appear in different form as the introduction to a new edition of As I Lay Dying, to be published by Modern Library in May.
 (May 2012)

Richard A. Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Frances FitzGerald’s books include Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. (November 2008)

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Her latest novel, No Time Like the Present, was published in March.
 (May 2012)

Francine du Plessix Gray received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006 for her memoir Them: A Memoir of Parents.

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright and essayist. His 1949 play, Death of A Salesman, received a Tony Award for Best Author, The New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, which has served as the setting for many of his novels. He won the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, and for Sabbath’s Theater, the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, and three PEN/Faulkner awards, for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman.

Edward W. Said is University Professor at Columbia University and the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. His The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After was published last spring. Reflections on Exile will appear in early 2001. (November 2000)

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.

Mark Strand teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His new book of poems, Almost Invisible, will be published in January. (November 2011)

John Updike (1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit: Angstrom, he two of which, Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

Derek Walcott is a poet, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His epic poem Omerosis a reworking of the Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.