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.

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)

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.

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 (1916–2000) was a British military intelligence officer and scholar of European history. His works include Leslie Stephen and Our Age, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, and The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought.

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas. Born in Riga, he moved in 1917 with his family to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution. 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.

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

Theodore H. Draper (1912–2006) was an American historian. Educated at City College, he wrote influential studies of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association.

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.His books include Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel, Blind into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq, and China Airborne.

James Merrill (1926–1995) was an American poet whose major work The Changing Light at Sandover describes a series of spirit communications conducted over many years. He won the National Book Award from his collections Nights and Days and Mirabell: Books of Number.

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.

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.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World.
 (January 2013)

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)

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) was an art critic and television writer. In the award-winning documentary series, The Shock of The New, Hughes recounted the development of modern art since the Impressionists; in The Fatal Shore, he explored the history of his native Australia. Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, was published in 2006.