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Contents

April 12, 1990 • Volume 37, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

John Russell (1919–2008) was Chief Art Critic at The New York Times from 1982 until 1990. He was the author of many art-historical studies, including Matisse, Father & Son and The Meanings of Modern Art.

Joseph Connors, the Director of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, writes on Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. He was formerly Director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of art history at Columbia.

John Higham is Professor of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black—White Relations Since World War II, which has just been published. (November 1997)

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.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

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)

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, which has served as the setting for many of his novels. He won the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, and for Sabbath’s Theater, the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, and three PEN/Faulkner awards, for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman.

Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent books are Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes and Liberty Before Liberalism. (November 2000)

Jonathan Spence is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Death of Woman Wang, Treason by the Book, The Question of Hu, and The Search for Modern China.

James McPherson is George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. His most recent book is War on the Waters: The Union and Confederates Navies, 1861-1865.

Larry McMurtry lives in Archer City, Texas. His novels include The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove (winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Folly and Gloryand Rhino Ranch. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West and, most recently, Custer.

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Author, Author and A Man of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

Derek Walcott is a poet, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His epic poem Omerosis a reworking of the Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, Eclipse, The Sea (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and Ancient Light. As Benjamin Black he has written six crime novels, including Vengeance.

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.

Adam Michnik is Editor in Chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. His piece in this issue will appear in Andrei Sakharov and Human Rights, a collection of Sakharov’s writings that is being published by the Council of Europe this month. (January 2011)

J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Breyten Breytenbach is the author of, among other books, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, which details his years in the prisons of the apartheid regime in South Africa. (November 1997)

Toni Morrison, Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton, is the author of seven novels. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. (August 2001)

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of numerous novels and collections of essays, including The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and most recently, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism.

William Shawcross is the author of several books on Cambodia. (December 1996)

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.

Margaret Atwood is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Blind Assassin, among other novels. Her most recent work of fiction is I’m Starved for You, a long short story available as an e-book.


(May 2012)

Michael Ondaatje’s novels are Coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil’s Ghost. His books of poetry include The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. His most recent book is The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright and essayist. His 1949 play, Death of A Salesman, received a Tony Award for Best Author, The New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was an English poet and essayist. As a young man, he became friends with W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood, a loose collection often referred to as “the Auden Group” or “MacSpaunday.” He published many collections of poems, including The Still Centre and Ruins and Visions, and numerous volumes of nonfiction and other works, including Learning Laughterand Love-Hate Relations.

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. His many plays include The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, and Moonlight. Please also see haroldpinter.org.

Margaret Drabble is an English biographer and critic, and the author of seventeen novels, including A Summer Bird Cage, The Millstone, and, most recently, The Sea Lady; A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories appeared in 2011. In 2006 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was born in Buenos Aires, the child of wealthy parents. He began to write in the early Thirties, and his stories appeared in the influential magazine Sur, through which he met his wife, the painter and writer Silvina Ocampo, as well Jorge Luis Borges, who was to become his mentor, friend, and collaborator. In 1940, after writing several novice works, Bioy published the novella The Invention of Morel, the first of his books to satisfy him, and the first in which he hit his characteristic note of uncanny and unexpectedly harrowing humor. Later publications include stories and novels, among them A Plan for Escape, A Dream of Heroes, and Asleep in the Sun. Bioy also collaborated with Borges on an Anthology of Fantastic Literature and a series of satirical sketches written under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq.

Jakov Lind (1927-2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth into an educated Jewish family in Vienna. After the 1938 Anschluss, Lind and one of his sisters were sent for safety to Holland, from where they were join their parents in Palestine; this proved impossible, and following the occupation of Holland, Lind, who was already fluent in Dutch, had no choice but to go into hiding. Taking the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek—”sailing under a false self,” as he would later describe it—he worked on a barge traveling up and down the Rhine. When the Allies began to bomb the industrial cities of the Rhine, Lind/Overbeek moved to Germany, where he was employed by a Nazi government ministry in Berlin. The end of the war allowed Lind to join his family in Palestine, but it was not long before he returned to Europe, studying drama in Vienna and, in 1954, settling in London, where he began work on the stories that were published in 1962 as Soul of Wood. Lind’s other books in German include the novels Landscape in Concrete and Ergo and, in English, four volumes of autobiography, two novels, and numerous stories. Lind was also a playwright and film director, as well as a talented visual artist. In a eulogy delivered at Lind’s funeral, Anthony Rudolf described Lind as “A coyote, a trickster…. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength—and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate.”

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

M. F. Perutz (1914–2002) was an Austrian molecular biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962. He is the author of Is Science Necessary?, Protein Structure, and I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier.