THE *Nation*

• FIFTY-FIVE FIFTH AVENUE • NEW YORK CITY •

January 22, 1940.

Dear Doctor Williams,

If you are in New York on
Wednesday, February seventh, I should
be happy to have you join us at a
party, from four to six, in honor of
**The Nation's** Seventy-fifth Anniversary
Issue.

Dr. William Carlos Williams,
9 Ridge Road,
Rutherford, N. J.

THE
NATION

333 SIXTH AVENUE • NEW YORK

July 10, 1957

Dear Mr. Williams:

The editorial board of The Nation would be most grateful for your help considering a problem that goes to the core of the magazine's editorial function. From contacts with both readers and contributors we sense a sharp dichotomy exists today between public and private concerns, between the issues in the headlines and those that most deeply trouble intellectuals.

The help consists in telling us what it is that really worries you - you deeply and steadily - about the social, political, intellectual, spiritual world in which we live.

Most serious magazines of general interest deal in considerable part with trouble, but it is largely trouble as defined by the headlines. Is Africa in the news? Hell's Canyon, Nuclear Fall-out, Bus Strikes, Delinquency? It is then the business of the editor to assign articles which will illuminate these problems and suggest such remedies as may be appropriate to the writer and the magazine.

But the trouble with concentrating on trouble at this level is that expressed is both opportunistic and superficial. The magazine finds led by a rapidly shifting sequence of events and it devotes too much attention to the critical symptoms of chronic malfunction.

It is perhaps significant in this context that the two Nation articles (to judge by reader response) roused the greatest interest in the last two weeks were no more than tangentially related to the news. These were The Young Men, our symposium on today's undergraduate, and Dr. Bronowski's searching article on Science and Human Values, to which we devoted a special issue.

What we ask you for, in essence, is a definition of the two or three which you feel underlie the troubles of the day. We, in turn, will try to grasp these issues in articles that should cut deeper and provoke further thought and more useful response than do the necessary but obvious appraisal of passing events.

We are making a similar request of about a score of our readers. You will see that we expect, will provide us with a continuing and constructive editor for the fall, the winter and in all likelihood many months beyond.