Contents

November 5, 1981 • Volume 28, Number 17

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) was an American economist. He taught economic history at the New School, where he was appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971.

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.

Peter B. Reddaway is Professor Emeritus of Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

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)

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her political and social commentary, literary essays, and drama criticism appeared in magazines such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, and were collected in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 (1963), The Writing on the Wall (1970), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and Occasional Prose (1985). Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942), The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She was the author of three works of autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1987), and the unfinished Intellectual Memoirs (1992), and two travel books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). Her essays on the Vietnam War were collected in The Seventeenth Degree (1974); her essays on Watergate were collected in The Mask of State (1974).

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917–2009) was an Irish historian and politician. He was elected to the Irish parliament in 1969 and served as a Minister from 1973 until 1977. His works include States of Ireland, The Great Melody and Memoir: My Life and Themes.

Alastair Reid is a poet, a prose chronicler, a translator, and a traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he has been a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He has published more than forty books, among them a wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn. Most recently, in 2008, he published in the U.K. two career-spanning volumes, Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations. The substance of Supposing… e gleaned from the many children who have influenced him, to all of whom he owes and dedicates the text.

Edmund Keeley is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus at Princeton. His latest books are Borderlines: A Memoir and the novel Some Wine for Remembrance. (November 2007)

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.

Wilfrid Sheed (1915–2011) was a British-American novelist and critic.

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.

Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent books are Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes and Liberty Before Liberalism. (November 2000)

H. R. Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was a British historian and the author of The Last Days of Hitler. He taught at Oxford, where he was the Regius Professor Modern History.