George Jean Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1882, and was graduated from Cornell University in 1904. He has been dramatic critic of various newspapers and periodicals, and is at present editor and part owner with H. L. Mencken of the Smart Set Magazine. Among his books are “The Popular Theatre,” “Comedians All,” “Another Book on the Theatre,” “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents,” “The Theatre, the Drama, the Girls,” and, with H. L. Mencken, of “The American Credo,” and “Heliogabalus.”
Walter Pach was born in New York in 1883, and was graduated from the College of the City of New York in 19013. He studied art under Leigh Hunt, William M. Chase, and Robert Henri, and worked during most of the eleven years before the War in Paris and other European art-centres, exhibiting both here and abroad. He was associated with the work of the International Exhibition of 1913, as well as other exhibitions of the modern masters in America, and with the founding and carrying on of the Society of Independent Artists. He is represented by paintings and etchings in various public and private collections, has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, University of California, Wellesley College, and other institutions, has contributed articles on art subjects to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, L’Arts et les Artistes, Scribner’s, the Century, the Freeman, etc., and is the translator of Elie Faure’s “History of Art.”
Elsie Clews Parsons was graduated from Barnard College in 1896, and received the degree of Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1899. She has been Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology at Barnard College, Lecturer in Anthropology in the New School of Social Research, assistant editor of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, treasurer of the American Ethnological Society, and president of the American Folk-Lore Society. She is married and the mother of three sons and one daughter. Among her books are “The Family,” “The Old-Fashioned Woman,” “Fear and Conventionality,” “Social Freedom,” and “Social Rule.”
Raffaello Piccoli, who has written the article on “American Civilization from an Italian Point of View,” was born in Naples in 1886, and was educated at the Universities of Padua, Florence, and Oxford. In 1913 he was appointed Lecturer in Italian Literature in the University of Cambridge, and in 1916 was elected Foreign Correspondent of the Royal Society of Literature. During the War he was an officer in the First Regiment of Italian Grenadiers, was wounded and taken prisoner while defending a bridge-head on the Tagliamento, and spent a year of captivity in Hungary. After the Armistice he was appointed to the chair of English Literature in the University of Pisa. During the years 1919–21 he has acted as exchange professor at various American universities. He has published a number of books, including Italian translations of Oscar Wilde and of several Elizabethan dramatists.
Louis Raymond Reid was born in Warsaw, N. Y., and was graduated from Rutgers College in 1911. Since then he has been engaged in newspaper and magazine work in New York City. He was for three years the editor of the Dramatic Mirror.
Geroid Tanquary Robinson was born in Chase City, Virginia, in 1892, and studied at Stanford, the University of California, and Columbia. He was a member of the editorial board of the Dial at the time when it was appearing as a fortnightly, and is now a member of the editorial staff of the Freeman, and a lecturer in Modern European History at Columbia University. He served for sixteen months during the War as a First Lieutenant (Adjutant) in the American Air Service. Residence in Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, and California has given him the opportunity to observe at first hand some of the modes and manners of race-prejudice.
J. Thorne Smith, Jr., was born in Annapolis, Md., in 1892, and was graduated from Dartmouth College in 1914. He was Chief Boatswain’s Mate in the U. S. Naval Reserve during the War, and editor of the navy paper, The Broadside. He is the author of “Haunts and By-Paths and Other Poems,” “Biltmore Oswald,” and “Out-O’-Luck.”
George Soule was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1887, and was graduated from Yale in 1908. He was a member of the editorial staff of the New Republic from 1914 to 1918, and during 1919 editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. He drafted a report on the labour policy of the Industrial Service Sections, Ordnance Department and Air Service, for the War Department, and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps. He is a director of the Labour Bureau, Inc., which engages in economic research for labour organizations, and is co-author with J. M. Budish of “The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry.”
J. E. Spingarn was born in New York in 1875, was educated at Columbia and Harvard, and was Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University until 1911. Among his other activities he has been a candidate for Congress, a delegate to state and national conventions, chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, vice-president of a publishing firm, and editor of the “European Library.” During the War he was a Major of Infantry in the A. E. F. His first book, “Literary Criticism in the Renaissance,” was translated into Italian in 1905, with an introduction by Benedetto Croce; he has edited three volumes of “Critical Essays of the 17th Century” for the Clarendon Press of Oxford, and contributed a chapter to the “Cambridge History of English Literature;” his selection of Goethe’s “Literary Essays,” with a foreword by Lord Haldane, has just appeared; and his other books include “The New Hesperides and Other Poems” and “Creative Criticism.”
Harold E. Stearns was born in Barre, Mass., in 1891, and was graduated from Harvard in 1913. Since then he has been engaged in journalism in New York, and has been a contributor to the New Republic, the Freeman, the Bookman, and other magazines and newspapers. He was associate editor of the Dial during the last six months of its appearance as a fortnightly in Chicago. Among his books are “Liberalism in America” and “America and the Young Intellectual.”