He was born in Brooklyn in 1896 and moved to Massachusetts at age 3, but Sessions noted that "I do have some memories of the inside of the house." He wrote his first opera at 13 and graduated from Harvard at 18. >From 1925 until 1933 he lived in Italy and Germany, supported by scholarships. Shortly after Hitler came to power, he returned to the U.S., and not long afterward joined the faculty at Princeton, where he remained until 1946. Then he taught at the University of California at Berkeley for eight years before returning to Princeton, where he remained until his mandatory retirement in 1965. Since that time he has taught at Juilliard. He and his wife Elizabeth have been married for 42 years; they have two children and two grandchildren. Said the composer: "I learned that I had a grandson just a few hours after I'd gotten the citation from the Pulitzer Prize Committee, and the grandson was much more exciting -- with all due respect." A resident of Princeton, New Jersey except for the one night each week that he spends on the West Side, Sessions is now eagerly awaiting the performance of his ninth symphony. It was completed in October and will be premiered in Syracuse shortly. In his Princeton study he is kept constantly busy composing new works, writing letters and correcting proofs. "I don't have any hobbies," he remarked at the end of the interview. "I like good books, but I don't get much time to read them. If I go a few days without composing, I start to feel a little bit depressed." ******** EASTSIDER DICK SHAWN Veteran comic talks about _Love at First Bite_ 5-19-79 Dick Shawn's name keeps cropping up these days. The last time he made a big splash in New York was two years ago, when his one-man show, _Dick Shawn is the Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World_, played at the Promenade Theatre for 14 weeks. But last fall, he gained millions of new fans with his sparkling appearances on the ill-fated network variety show starring Mary Tyler Moore, which folded after the third week. A commonly heard criticism of the show was: less Mary and more Shawn. In George Hamilton's recently released film, _Love At First Bite_, Shawn plays the role of Lieutenant Ferguson, who teams up with a psychiatrist in order to make war on Dracula. Also he recently played the lead in the new Russell Baker/Cy Coleman musical, _Home Again_. But these are only a few of the highlights of Shawn's career, as I discover in an interview with the 51-year-old comedian at his plush Upper East Side apartment. The word "comedian," he quickly points out, is not quite accurate. "I think of myself as a comedy character," he explains, relaxing on his couch with a plate of croissants and bacon that his pretty assistant has just brought him. "In _Home Again_, I played seven characters. ... They ran out of money; it just closed out of town. It needs another four or five weeks of work. They plan to bring it back around September."