László Péter

László Péter was Emeritus Professor of Hungarian History at the University of London. He completed his first degree at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest after which he worked as an archivist and teacher. He left Hungary in 1956, subsequently completing a DPhil in Oxford under the supervision of C.A. Macartney and John Plamenatz. In 1961, he was appointed to a lectureship at SSEES and to a full chair in 1990. He retired in 1994.

László Péter published extensively on the constitutional history of Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy, mostly in the nineteenth century. He was an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of University College London.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Péter was appointed to the revolutionary committee charged with the supervision and cataloguing of the archives of the Ministry of the Interior.

Roman Bohnen

Roman Bohnen was a stage and film actor.

Born Roman Aloys Bohnen in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bohnen attended the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1923 with a B.A. He served his acting apprenticeship in theater companies in St. Paul and Chicago before making his Broadway debut in 1931 in As Husbands Go.

Between 1934 and 1940, he belonged to the Group Theatre and appeared in numerous plays. Incubator, which he co-wrote with John Lyman, was produced in 1932.

Bohnen's first film was the 1937 Vogues of 1938. By 1941, he was working almost exclusively in film. Among his better-known roles are Candy in Of Mice and Men (1939) and Pat Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

In The Beginning or the End Bohnen was cast as President Harry Truman. The MGM film was a docu-drama about the atomic bomb. The film was publicly released in 1947. After a private screening in late 1946, President Truman let it be known that he disapproved his portrayal regarding the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. On December 2, 1946, Bohnen wrote Truman that he should portray himself. On December 12, 1946, Truman responded to Bohnen's letter, but declined the chance to portray himself, and said that he was "sure you (Bohnen) will do the part creditably". Ultimately the scenes were re-shot with actor Art Baker re-cast as President Truman.

A co-founder of the politically active Actors Laboratory Theatre, he was working on its production of A Distant Isle when he collapsed and died in Hollywood, California in 1949. He was blacklisted before his death, and afterwards his name was mentioned in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and '50s.

As a child, Goodman freely roamed the streets and public libraries of his native New York City, experiences which later inspired his radical concept of "the educative city". He graduated from The City College of New York in 1932 and completed his Ph.D. work at the University of Chicago in 1939. (He was not officially awarded his Ph.D. until 1953, for the dissertation which was later published by the University of Chicago as The Structure of Literature.)

Goodman was a prolific writer of essays, fiction and poetry. Although he had been writing short stories since 1932, his first novel, The Grand Piano, was published in 1942.

In the mid-1940s, together with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald. In 1947, he published two books, Kafka's Prayer and Communitas, a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival Goodman. Fame came only with the 1960 publication of his Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System.

Goodman also knew and worked with other leading New York intellectuals, including Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv. As well as collaborating with Politics, his writings appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent and The New York Review of Books.

Goodman was strongly influenced by Otto Rank's "here-and-now" approach to psychotherapy, fundamental to Gestalt therapy, as well as Rank's post-Freudian book Art and Artist (1932). In the late 1940s, Fritz Perls asked Goodman to write up the notes which were to become the seminal work for the new therapy, Part II of Perls, Goodman, and Hefferline (1951) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. A year later, Goodman would become one of the Group of Seven - Fritz and Laura Perls, Isadore From, Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, Paul Weiss, Richard Kitzler - the founding members of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.

Goodman wrote on a wide variety of subjects; including education, Gestalt Therapy, city life and urban design, children's rights, politics, literary criticism, and many more. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman said "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist."

He was equally at home with the avant-garde and with classical texts, and his fiction often mixes formal and experimental styles. The style and subject matter of Goodman's short stories influenced those of Guy Davenport.

In 1967, Goodman's son Matthew died in a mountain climbing accident. Paul's friends claimed that he never recovered from the resulting grief, and his health began to deteriorate. He died of a heart attack just before his 61st birthday