Contents

November 30, 2006 • Volume 53, 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.

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He is also Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (February 2012)

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 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; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. His latest book of poetry is Planisphere and his new translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations will be available in paperback in May.


Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. (June 2009)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s most recent works are Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Max Rodenbeck is The Economist‘s Mideast Correspondent. He lives in Cairo. (October 2011)

Frank J. Sulloway is Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. (November 2006)

John Leonard writes on books every month for Harper’s and on television every week for New York magazine. (June 2007)

James M. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Master (a novel based on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

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)

John Brewerteaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century. (June 2008)

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Adjunct Professor at the University of Iowa. (April 2011)

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened Americaå?s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)

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)