December 1969

In This Issue
Explore the December 1969 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
How Nobel Prizewinners Get That Way
You are barely past thirty and have just received from Stockholm the telegram that says you have won a Nobel Prize for Science. How do you feel?
The Rise of the Phoenix
Tantrums and Unicorns
Genius Unobserved
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Hard Road
The Naked Gambit
Short Reviews: Books
Twelve brief book reviews
Israel
SDS at Chicago
Washington
Making It in America
“Wherever the American writer goes, be finds before him the temptation to try to “make it’,” and his fear of doing so can he compulsive and crippling. The wages of ambition and success may be deplorable, according to the author of this essay, but the same can be true of “tyrannies of virtue,” whether they emanate from literary critics, or from George Wallace on the right or Herbert Marcuse on the left.
At Mercy Manor
Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington: Kissinger on the Job
The man who confers with President Nixon more often and more intensively than any other in Washington is a Harvard Professor who is said to admire Metternich but in fact finds in the thinking of Otto von Bismarck the guidelines to America’s role in the world today.
Afterword
Thumbing Around: Letter From a Sixteen-Year-Old
This missive from the other side of the gap allows one to ask, Who’s calling whom materialistic?
Wyndham Lewis
A nonverbal art requires a nonverbal comment. Did Marshall McLuhan say that? No, it was Wyndham Lewis, the rambunctious Englishman of arts and letters in whose observations and eccentricities McLuhan found impulse for his own ventures into the Gutenberg Galaxy, The Medium is the Message, and the rest of what has come to be called McLuhanism. This memoir is perhaps untypical, verbal comment.
A Short Account of the Japanese
Mr. Sammler's Planet (Part II)
