Contents

May 17, 1990 • Volume 37, Number 8

LETTERS

Contributors

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

John Bayley is a critic and novelist. His books include Elegy for Iris and The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

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.

Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, is a longtime human rights activist and the Chair of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation in Moscow. (March 2001)

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.

Jack Flam is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship, has just been published. (March 2003)

Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004) was an English philosopher. He taught at University College London, Princeton, Stanford and Oxford, where he was named Warden of Wadham College. His books include Thought and Action, Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.

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.

Jeri Laber, Senior Advisor to Human Rights Watch, was formerly executive director of its Helsinki division. She is the author, with Barnett R. Rubin, of ‘A Nation is Dying’: Afghanistan Under the Soviets, 1979—1987. (January 1997)

Nicholas Lemann is Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.


Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

Eric L. McKitrick (1920–2002) was a historian of the United States. Educated at Columbia, McKitrick taught at the University of Chicago and Rutgers before returning to Columbia in 1960. He is perhaps best known for Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction; his other works treated slavery and the American South, as well as the history of the American party system.

David Remnick is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin’s Tomb, The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, and Resurrection. He is the editor of The New Yorker.

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.

Robert M. Adams (1915-1996) was a founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Cornell and U.C.L.A. His scholarly interested ranged from Milton to Joyce, and his translations of many classic works of French literature continue to be read to this day.