Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

November 4, 1999 • Volume 46, Number 17

LETTERS

Contributors

Gordon A. Craig (1913–2005) was a Scottish-American historian of Germany. He taught at both Princeton and Stanford, where he was named the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1979.

Andrew Delbanco is Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia. His new books, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be and The Abolitionist Imagination, will be published in April.
 (February 2012)

Whitney Balliett’s most recent book is Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954—2001 (August 2003).

Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

Shaul Bakhash is Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution. (September 2005)

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.

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

David Gilmour is the author of The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which was published in a revised and enlarged edition last year. He has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. (June 2008)

Jasper Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include Homer on Life and Death.

Seamus Heaney’s first poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-American journalist and social critic. Known for his confrontational style and contrarian views on a range of social issues, Hitchens was a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. Hitchens recounts his struggle with esophageal cancer in Mortality, which was published in 2012.

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.

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.

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2007 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and the author, with Andrew Meltzoff, of Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Her new book, written with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, is The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains and How Children Learn, which will be published in September. (May 1999)

Richard Wilbur’s book Mayflies: New Poems and Translations will be published in April. (November 2000)

Robert L. Herbert, after a long career at Yale, is now Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has been named Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Among his books are Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts, and Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. His most recent book is Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte.

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)

Colin McGinn’s books include Shakespeare’s Philosophy, Basic Structures of Reality, and, most recently, Truth by Analysis.
 (March 2013)

Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian of China, is the former East Asia Editor of The Times of London.
 (May 2013)