Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the following individuals—

To Jesse Matz, Gerhard Joseph, Nico Israel, Frank L. Cioffi, and Mario DiGangi for advising me on this project,

To the staffs of Studies in the Novel and Contemporary Literature, who published excerpts of this material in their pages and have permitted me to reprint them here.

To Jay Barksdale, Carolyn Broomhead, Melanie Locay, and the New York Public Library for granting me access to the Wertheim Study while I researched,

To James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Marc Dolan, Edmund L. Epstein, Reagan Lothes, Nikolina Nedeljkov, Josh Schneiderman, Judd Staley, and Alaya Swann for reading and providing feedback on earlier drafts,

To Russell Backman, Ben Barber, Martin Brick, George Derk, Abram Foley, Laura Hensch, Stephen Hock, Teffany Hunley, David B. Olson, Gavin Pate, and Kyle Smith for copresenting with me on various conference panels where I introduced much of this material,

To H. Porter Abbott, Stephen Burn, William K. Wootters, and Jason Tougaw for graciously responding to my emails with important suggestions and references,

To Robert Bell, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Stephen Fix, and David Greetham, in whose classes many of the ideas expressed in this book took root,

To Gloria Fisk and Carrie Hintz for their mentorship over the past several years,

To Jim Shepard and Chip Delany for shaping my prose style,

To everyone I’ve cited, for being just right enough to prevent me from making some silly mistakes and just wrong enough to allow this book to come into being,

And to Katie, for everything else.