Contents

February 19, 1981 • Volume 28, Number 2

LETTERS

Contributors

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

Raymond Carr was Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and has written extensively on modern Spanish history.

Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at MIT.

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) was a philosopher. Educated at CUNY, The Jewish Theological Seminary and The University of Pennsylvania, Morgenbesser taught at Columbia, where he was named John Dewey Professor of Philosophy.

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.

István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia. He is the author, with Jan Gross and Tony Judt, of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath.

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.

Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was a writer and teacher. Among his books are On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from Howells to Faulkner, and the memoirs A Walker in the Cityand New York Jew. In 1996, he received the first Lifetime Award in Literary Criticism from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

David Joravsky is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern. His books include The Lysenko Affairand Russian Psychology: A Critical History.

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.

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.

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

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.

Frances A. Yates (1899–1981) was an English historian. She taught for many years at The Warburg Institute, where she studied the history of esotericism in the West.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at New York University, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. His works include The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and The American Classics.

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.”