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Including contributions byW. H. Auden Elizabeth Bishop John Cheever Janet Flanner John Hersey Langston Hughes Shirley Jackson A. J. Liebling William Maxwell Carson McCullers Joseph Mitchell Vladimir Nabokov Ogden Nash John OHara George Orwell V. S. Pritchett Lillian Ross Stephen Spender Lionel Trilling Rebecca West E. B. White Williams Carlos Williams Edmund Wilson And featuring new perspectives byJoan Acocella Hilton Als Dan Chiasson David Denby Jill Lepore Louis Menand Susan Orlean George Packer David Remnick Alex Ross Peter Schjeldahl Zadie Smith Judith ThurmanThe 1940s are the watershed decade of the twentieth century, a time of trauma and upheaval but also of innovation and profound and lasting cultural change.