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Contents

March 31, 1988 • Volume 35, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Arthur Hertzberg (1921–2006) was a Conservative rabbi, scholar and activist. His books include The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism and The Zionist Idea.

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) was a philosopher. Educated at CUNY, The Jewish Theological Seminary and The University of Pennsylvania, Morgenbesser taught at Columbia, where he was named John Dewey Professor of Philosophy.

Harold Bloom’s most recent books are The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life and The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. He teaches at Yale and is at work on a play, To You Whoever You are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman.
 (February 2012)

Robert Craft is a conductor and writer. Craft’s close working friendship with Igor Stravinsky is the subject of his memoir, An Improbable Life. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival.

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.

Thomas Flanagan (1923–2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley, where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers, including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland’s history and literature also helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics’ Circle award for fiction) and continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review. A collection of his essays, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, is also published by New York Review Books.

M.F. Burnyeat is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of The Theaetetus of Plato and A Map of Metaphysics Zeta. (November 2001)

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.

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977. The translation in this issue appears in Verses and Versions, a collection of Nabokov’s translations of three centuries of Russian poetry, published this month by Harcourt. (November 2008)

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.

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.

Lord Zuckerman (1904–1993) was a British zoologist and military strategist. Having advised the Allies on bombing strategy during World War II, he spent much of his later life campaigning for nuclear non-proliferation. Zuckerman was knighted in 1956 and made a life peer in 1971.

Adrian Lyttelton is Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University Center in Bologna and the author of The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919–1929. (March 2006)

Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, with appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. Her most recent book is Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. (January 2001)