AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

The neighborhood of Morningside Heights and most of the institutions that play a role in this book strongly resemble their real-life counterparts and in most instances bear the same names. Nonetheless, as represented here, they are fictional, and I deliberately forsook verisimilitude again and again. To give just three of many examples that might be cited, 444 Riverside Drive is an imaginary address, the real Columbia University has no chancellor, and the real Metropolitan Opera (a rather different institution from the one in this book) did not present Verdi’s Macbeth in 2002–03. The fictional characters in this book resemble some of the kinds of people who live in the real Morningside Heights, but none is based upon, or is intended to resemble, any real person or any events in the life of one.