Contents

October 27, 1983 • Volume 30, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911. 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. He died in 2004.

Adam Zagajewski’s books include Eternal Enemies 
and Without End: New and Selected Poems. The poems in this issue are from his new book, Unseen Hand, published in May by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (May 2011)

Noel Annan is the author of Leslie Stephen and Our Age, among other books. (October 1999)

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997. For more information, see the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

Jerome Bruner is University Professor at New York University. His newest book, Making Stories, appeared in the spring. (September 2003)

Theodore Draper’s books include The Roots of American Communism and A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. He is at work on a book about the nineteenth century in the US. (September 1999)

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).

James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic and author, most recently, of Free Flight. (March 2002)

James Merrill died in 1995. The poem in this issue appears in Last Poems, a collection of previously unpublished work, just published by Thornwillow Press. (December 1998)

Gore Vidal’s most recent novel is The Golden Age. (February 2002)

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.

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World. (June 2011)

Marshall Frady’s books include Wallace, Billy Graham, Southerners, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, and, most recently, Martin Luther King, Jr. He is currently writing a biography of Fidel Castro. (February 2004)