Contents

October 22, 1981 • Volume 28, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert M. Adams (1915-1996) was a founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Cornell and U.C.L.A. His scholarly interested ranged from Milton to Joyce, and his translations of many classic works of French literature continue to be read to this day.

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.


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.

Aileen Kelly is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Her books include Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance and Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin.

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.

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.

Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin).

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896 and died in 1981. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. (November 2004)

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and The Dolphin are among his many volumes of verse. He was confounder of and contributor to The New York Review of Books.

C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of the American South. He taught at Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where he was named the Sterling Professor of History. His books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World.

Jonathan Lieberson (1949–1989) was a philosopher, editor and critic. Lieberson taught at Barnard and Columbia. His book of essays, Varieties, included reflections on personalities as diverse as Diana Vreeland, Paul Valery and Clifford Geertz.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


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