As novelists go, I am not a particularly private or solitary individual. I tend to talk about work in progress with a small body of trusted friends, and have the good sense to listen to their ideas. I also show various drafts to various readers, and each helps to make the novel in question stronger and truer than I’d be capable of making it on my own.
I extend my deepest gratitude to Diane Cardwell, Judy Clain, Frances Coady, Joel Connarroe, Stacey D’Erasmo, Marie Howe, Joy Johannessen, Daniel Kaizer, James Lecesne, Michael Mayer, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, and Derrick Smit. Also crucial readers, and much more than that, are my agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Jonathan Galassi. Marianne Merola sees to it that my books are well published outside the United States. Susan Mitchell, Jeff Seroy, Timothy Mennel, Sarita Varma, and Annie Wedekind have been heroic in their efforts to make this book look beautiful, to catch its errors of fact and infelicities of diction, and to convey it into the world.
The assistance and friendship of Meg Giles have been crucial in ways too numerous to mention.
I wrote the third section while staying at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany at the invitation of Beatrice von Rezzori, whose generosity toward writers is nothing short of remarkable.
I relied for information on Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger, published in 1994 by Henry Holt and Company; Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving, published in 1999 by the University of California Press; Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds, published in 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf; and the edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published by the Library of America in 1992. Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham, was kind enough to e-mail me in response to certain questions regarding life in the nineteenth century. Although the reader will not learn about the underwear those characters are wearing, I know, thanks to Mike Wallace, and that helped me to more fully imagine them.
Finally I must acknowledge Ken Corbett, who not only reads passages as I go along, offers brilliant suggestions, and talks me through my fits of discouragement, but helps to create a domestic environment of discrimination, generosity, humor, scrupulous thought, and belief in the fundamental human obligation to try to do at least a little more than one is technically able to.