Contents

April 13, 2000 • Volume 47, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


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)

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)

Jared Diamond, a Professor of Physiology and Public Health at UCLA and winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Medal of Science, is the author of, among other books, Guns, Germs, and Steel. (March 2004)

David J. Garrow is the Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University Law School and the author of Bearing the Cross, which won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize. (April 2000)

Anthony Lewis, a former columnist for The New York Times, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.

Jack F. Matlock Jr. was US Ambassador to the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1991 and is the author of Autopsy on an Empire. He is George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (February 2000)

Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. Among the exhibitions he has organized is “James McNeill Whistler,” seen at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(February 2012)

James Fenton is a visiting fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
 (March 2012)

Alma Guillermoprieto is the author of Dancing with Cuba, a memoir of her experience teaching Cunningham and Graham technique in Havana’s national schools of art.
 (February 2012)

Kenneth Koch died on July 6, 2002. He was Professor of English at Columbia. During his lifetime, he published at least thirty volumes of poetry and plays. He was also the author of a novel, The Red Robins; two books on teaching poetry writing to children, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home. A new collection of his poetry, A Possible World, and Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–54, will be published this fall. (August 2002)

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

Lorrie Moore teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She has won the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Her most recent book is A Gate at the Stairs.
 (December 2011)

Andrew O’Hagan was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, is now out in paperback. (September 2011)

Rosemary Dinnage’s books include The Ruffian on the Stair, One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Willibald Sauerländer is a former director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. His book on Rubens’s altarpieces has been just published. (November 2011)

George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC and the Open Society Foundations. The article in this issue is based on a talk he gave at the 2012 Davos World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.
 (February 2012)

M. F. Perutz, former Chairman of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962. He is the author of Is Science Necessary?, Protein Structure, and, most recently, I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier. (November 2001)

Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, Tolstaya worked for several years at a Moscow publishing house. In the mid-1980s, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines and her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the co-host of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal. Both her novel, The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death in 2009. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. (November 2011)