Thanks to Matt Weiland, a deft and insightful editor whose continual encouragement helped me through many a rough patch. Thanks to the endlessly patient and conscientious Sam MacLaughlin, who worked out many a line that had gone cattywampus. Thanks also to my excellent copyeditor, Rachelle Mandik, and to the entire team at Norton.
Thanks to my agent, Brandi Bowles, and my editors at The Paris Review Daily, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn and Sadie Stein, who published an early version of the chapter on Eudora Welty and helped shape the idea for this book.
I am indebted to the many people who helped with my research, particularly Susan Haltom, Don Haselden, Ted Geltner, Mary Alice Welty White, Cory MacLauchlin, Craig Amason, Erik Bledsoe, Suzanne Marrs, Mary Annie Brown, and Sally Wolff-King. Thanks to Anna Hartford, a keen-eyed and generous first reader. To the friends and family who sheltered me, fed me, joined me on my journeys, offered me whiskey and advice, took care of my ornery cats, listened to me wax endless on the virtues and vices of Southern writers, read scraps of my drafts, and otherwise put up with me during these book-writing years—my brothers Conor and Brendan, my sister-in-law Susan, Katie Porter, Susan Colvin, Winston Bell, Lorianna Baker, Nick Russell, Eliza Lloyd, Lucas Adams, Will Dizard, Andrew Martin, Jared Miller, Anne Epstein, Rachel Apatoff, Aja Hazelhoff, Beth Stebner, Laurie Kamens, Jessica Loudis, and Eli Goldfarb—I can’t thank you enough.
My teachers at the Altamont School in Birmingham got me hooked on Southern literature at a young age, in particular Jim Palmer, brave or foolish enough to teach Faulkner to a class of know-nothing eighth-graders, and Jimmy Wiygul, who took a busload of seventeen-year-olds on our first literary pilgrimage.
If anyone can be blamed for aiding this bibliophilia of mine, it has to be my wonderful parents, Tom and Mary. I am unendingly grateful for their love, support, and reluctance to stop me from reading at the dinner table.