Dear TIME-Reader:

IN Paris, Head Chef Eugene Lerch of the luxurious Hotel George V saw a TIME footnote about President Eisenhower's cooking and bubbled up in rage like a fondue that has been too close to the fire too long. "It's not true," Chef Lerch cried and fired off a protest to TIME'S editors. In Troy, N.Y. Eighth-Grader Lisa Fitzgerald read our review of Humorist H. Allen Smith's Write Me a Poem, Baby. Lisa, who writes poetry and reviews for the Willard Day School literary magazine Pipes of Pan, was delighted, and she sat right down and wrote to the editors to tell them so.

Each week more and more TIME-readers write to the editors to applaud, lambaste or argue about stories in the magazine. Some offer additional information out of their own experiences. Others choose TIME'S Letters column as a forum to air their own views on world events and figures. Whatever the approach, their sprightly and often spirited commentaries from every corner of the earth have made TIME'S Letters columns one of the best-read international forums in the world.

"It always amazes me to see the 'big names' who write TIME'S letters," wrote Canadian Reader Stan Obodiac of Yorkton, Sask. "One recent issue [Nov. 26], I believe, hit the alltime high: Ignazio Silone, Renata Tebaldi, Major General Chennault, Ed Sullivan, Floyd B. Odium, to name several."

These unsolicited letters, whether they come from a schoolgirl such as Lisa Fitzgerald or a Nobel prizewinner such as William Faulkner, have one quality in common: a nononsense, no-holds-barred sense of deep and outspoken conviction. Late in the year many of our letter writers share another trait: they are reviewing the events of the year and choosing their candidates for TIME'S Man of the Year. One of these this year was Finbarr M. Slattery, who is known as "the divil to argue" in his native village, Asdee (pop. 250) in County Kerry, where the Shannon meets the sea.

Finbarr was sitting before a turf fire when he made his final choice. Said he: "I was reading TIME'S account of the fight the Hungarians were putting up against the Russians. It was deeply moving--one of the finest pieces of reporting I had ever read. I thought of the sacrifices the men and women and children of Hungary were making for freedom. They were a symbol, I thought. And then I remembered that TIME had picked the G.I. in Korea as a symbol, and I knew they must pick a Hungarian now. So I put aside TIME and wrote to them."

Though TIME'S editors make a firm rule of not being influenced by reader nominations, they thoroughly agreed with Reader Slattery about 1956's Man of the Year.

Cordially yours, James A. Linen

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