The Winners

To the Editors:

I thought your readers might be interested in the answers to our Modern Library 50th Anniversary Contest Sweepstakes that we ran with you in October. Some confusion resulted from an error on our part under David Levine’s sketch number 7 (James Joyce). There were three blanks for the titles of his books but there should have been only two, for Ulysses and The Dubliners. Taking the others in order, the answers are:

(1) Kierkegaard, (2) Honoré de Balzac, (3) Lord Byron, (4) Fyodor Dostoyevsky, (5) Oscar Wilde, (6) Friedrich Nietzsche, (8) Edgar Allen Poe, (9) Albert Camus, (10) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (11) Joseph Conrad, (12) D. H. Lawrence, (13) Sigmund Freud, (14) Jean Genet, (15) John Dewey, (16) Sir Richard Burton, (17) Anton Chekhov, (18) Dante Alighieri, (19) Bernard Shaw, (20) William Faulkner, (21) Mark Twain, (22) Pushkin.

We received about 5,500 entries which I think is pretty impressive considering that the contestants had to name 22 authors from David Levine’s caricatures—also write out the titles of 59 of their books.

The winner of the classic Phaeton Car was Miss Lynn Levenberg of Greenwich Village. She is, coincidentally, a writer. She was last seen heading south with the top down.

The second prize was won by Waverly Barbe, who is a professor at the Tuscaloosa State College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And the third prize was won by Conrad Discont, who is a Junior College Instructor in Fresno, California. The second and third prizes were a complete set of Modern Library books (373). There were 21 other winners from all over the country and remarkably enough 25 percent of the winners were from California. Could this mean that the intellectual center of America has shifted along with the population?

I shall leave you with this rather tragic thought to ponder.

William H. Ryan

Advertising Manager

Random House

New York City