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Contents

January 21, 1982 • Volume 28, Number 21 & 22

LETTERS

Contributors

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky moved to the United States when he was exiled from Russia in 1972. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech andTo Urania; his essay collections include Less Than One, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Watermark. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as US Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. Over the course of his long and prolific career he published works in many genres, including criticism (The Captive Mind), fiction (The Issa Valley), memoir (Native Realm), and poetry (New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001). He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover.

Stanisław Barańczak is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He won the 2007 Nike Award for the best work of Polish literature published in the previous year and the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement. He is a professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard University.

Leszek Kołakowski was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw until March 1968 when he was formally expelled for political reasons. He was later a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the author of several books, including Main Currents in Marxism. The article in this issue will appear in the collection of essays Is God Happy?, to be published in February by Basic Books. He died in 2009. (December 2012)

Richard Ellmann (1918–1987) was an American critic and biographer. He taught at Northwestern, Oxford and Emory, where he was named Robert W. Professor in 1980. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joycein 1959; a revised edition was awarded the James Tate Black Memorial Prize in 1982.

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.

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.

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) was an American diplomat, political scientist and historian. He is best known for his role in shaping US foreign policy during the Cold War and, in particular, for the doctrine of containment. Kennan was Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and served as Ambassador to the USSR in 1952 and as Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. His books include At a Century’s Ending and An American Family.

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.

Christopher Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard. He is working on a book about the social and political consequences of growing inequality. (September 2007)

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) was a British essayist, novelist and short story writer. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitorand as a literary critic forNew Statesman. In 1968 Pritchett was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; he was knighted in 1975. His body of work includes many collections of short stories, in addition to travelogues, reviews, literary biographies and novels.

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Felix Rohatyn is an investment banker and has been a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, Chairman of the New York Municipal Assistance Corporation, and US Ambassador to France. (October 2008)

James Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair.

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

John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso, Volume Three, was published in 2007. Volume One won the Whitbread Prize in England in 1991.