This building, which incorporates a 1929 addition designed by H. Brooks Price, became the Academy's Annex and houses additional gallery space. In 2009, the space between the Annex and the administration building was turned into a new entrance link, designed by Vincent Czajka with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Membership Members of the Academy are chosen for life and have included some of the American art scene's leading figures. They are organized into committees that award annual prizes to up-and-coming artists. Although the names of some of the organization's members may not be well-known today, each was well-known in their time. Greatness and pettiness are demonstrable among the Academy members, even during the first decade, when William James declined his nomination on the grounds that his little brother Henry had been elected first. One of the giants of the academy in his time, Robert Underwood Johnson, casts a decades-long shadow in his one-man war against encroaching modernism, blackballing such writers as H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot (before his emigration to England disqualified him for full membership). Former Harvard president Charles William Eliot declined election to the Academy "because he was already in so many societies that he didn't want to add to the number". Although never explicitly excluded, women were not elected to membership in the early years. The admission of Julia Ward Howe in January 1908 (at age 88) as the first woman in the Academy was only one incident in the intense debate about the consideration of female members. In 1926, the election of four women— Edith Wharton, Margaret Deland, Agnes Repplier and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman—was said to have "marked the letting down of the bars to women". Below is a partial list of past members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its successor institution, the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters: Henry Brooks Adams Herbert Adams Henry Mills Alden Nelson Algren Hannah Arendt Newton Arvin Wystan Hugh Auden Paul Wayland Bartlett Chester Beach Stephen Vincent Benét William Rose Benét Edwin Howland Blashfield William Brownell George de Forest Brush John Burroughs William S. Burroughs Nicholas Murray Butler George Washington Cable Hortense Calisher Joseph Campbell George Whitefield Chadwick William Merritt Chase Chou Wen-chung Timothy Cole Billy Collins Kenyon Cox John Dos Passos Bob Dylan Thomas Harlan Ellett Stanley Elkin Duke Ellington Ralph Ellison Daniel Chester French William Gaddis