IN THE COURSE OF this book, the author uses techniques such as inner monologues and stream of consciousness. The reader may well ask how the author got inside his subject’s head. The answer is that the author interviewed the subject exhaustively, over a period of four years, for more than 100 hours, and that the subject has an unusually retentive memory. He remembers, for instance, entire passages of Shakespeare which he learned in Mr. Kittredge’s course at Harvard, and he also remembers his state of mind at a given moment in the past. In this way, the author is able to reconstruct what the subject was thinking, in the sometimes rambling and associative style that reproduces the process of thought. The subject has been given the opportunity to go over such passages to check their accuracy. In other instances, when the author quotes from the subject’s work without identifying it, those passages are rendered in italics. Finally, when a name has been changed to protect someone’s identity, the reader will be notified when the character is introduced.