Contents

December 2, 2004 • Volume 51, Number 19

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Robert Gottlieb has been Editor in Chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. His most recent book is Lives and Letters. (September 2011)

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, and Author, Author. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

Henry Siegman is President of the U.S./Middle East Project. He is a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress.

Monica Ferrell is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. (December 2004)

Alan Ryan, the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell, is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women. He teaches at Princeton. (December 2011)

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

Richard Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is the author of Class and Schools, published earlier this year. (December 2004)

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy. (June 2006)

Mark Ford’s third collection of poetry, Six Children, a volume of criticism, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays, and his translation of Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique were recently published. (October 2011)

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of six books, including How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard.

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.


Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in Massachusetts.

Anthony Hecht’sCollected Later Poems and Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry were published in 2003. He died on October 20. (December 2004)

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His most recent book is The Idea of Justice. (May 2011)

Stanley Hoffmann is Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard. His most recent books are Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy and Rousseau and Freedom, coedited with Christie McDonald.