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Contents

December 21, 2000 • Volume 47, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is currently writing a book about Times Square. (February 2002)

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Tony Judt (1948–2010) was the founder and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, among other books.

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His book Torture and the Forever War will be published in the spring of 2013. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com.

A. S. Byatt’s book of essays On Histories and Stories will be published in the US next year. Her new novel, The Biographer’s Tale, will be published here in January. (November 2000)

Peter Matthiessen won the 2008 National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country. His recent books include End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica and The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. (November 2009)

William Styron (1925–2006) was the author of several novels, including Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Rose B. Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist. She is the author of By Vineyard Light, a collection of poems centered on Martha’s Vineyard, where she and her husband, writer William Styron, spent extended summers. Her other books include From Summer to Summer, Thieves’ Afternoon and Modern Russian Poetry.

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

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

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. His books include King Leopold’s Ghost and, most recently, To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

E.L. Doctorow is the author most recently of All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, which appeared last year. His essay in this issue will appear in different form as the introduction to a new edition of As I Lay Dying, to be published by Modern Library in May.
 (May 2012)

Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance, a collection of three novellas, will be published this year. (April 2011)

Dan Jacobson is a novelist and essayist. His latest book is Heschel’s Kingdom, a memoir and account of his travels in Lithuania. (November 2002)

Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mark Morris, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She also edited the recent, unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Her article in the May 23, 2013 issue is adapted from her introduction to a new edition of Isadora Duncan’s My Life, published in May 2013 by Liveright.


James Chace is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law at Bard College. He is the author of Acheson and, most recently, 1912: The Election That Changed the Country. He is now working on a biography of Lafayette. (October 2004)

Prudence Crowther is the copy chief at BusinessWeek. (April 2007)

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His latest book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.


Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College. His latest book, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations, was published in May.
 (June 2012)

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.

Clive James is the author of many books of criticism, autobiography, fiction, and poetry. Among his books are Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, The Blaze of Obscurity, and A Point of View.

Lars-Erik Nelson (1941-2000) was the Washington columnist for the New York Daily News, and a frequent contributor to the Review.

John Maynard Smith, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, is the author of On Evolution, The Evolution of Sex, Evolution and the Theory of Games, and, with Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution. (December 2000)

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Israel Rosenfield and Edward B. Ziff’s most recent book is DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule That Shook the World. They are completing a book about the brain. Rosenfield is also completing a graphic novel illustrated by Fiammetta Ghedini. (June 2012)

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.