STEFAN KANFER is the young author of an off-Broadway musical and several short stories and articles. The Yiddish theater is, literally, in his blood. His great-grandfather was in Abraham Goldfaden's first Yiddish theater troupe in Iasi, Romania, and his grandfather was the author of Yiddish plays produced in Europe and America.

PIERRE EMMANUEL,himself a poet and a critic, is particularly aware of the problems of the critic. Mr. Emmanuel, who was born in 1916, is the author of some fifteen volumes of prose and verse; he taught mathematics and philosophy at a French lyeée but stepped out of academic dress to take an active part in the Resistance movement. He is now in charge of the English-language broadcasts of the French government radio station, Radiodiffusion Francaise.

The late Irving Howe -- literary critic, biographer, historian and teacher -- was a beacon of a certain kind of intellectual and moral possibility

"What counts is that the critic should be really involved with a work; that he should follow the track of his curiosity into it just as long and as passionately as may be necessary."

Writers about writers this month engage the attention of ATLANTIC critic Louis Kronenberger. He illuminates the literary biographer’s problem in deciding whether to write about a man who wrote books or about the books a man wrote.