Colleagues, friends, and family have assisted in making the writing of this book possible. My thanks to Frank Boyle for his pursuit of a manageable teaching schedule, and to Connie Hassett for her always-savvy professional advice. To Phyllis Spiegel and Vicki Saunders I owe much, including good health. Sandy Zagarell and Eve Sandberg read The Raven and the Nightingale in manuscript and provided that most invaluable of reader response, confirmation of the writer’s own instincts. Frank Couvares gave me one of Piotrowski’s best lines. Kate Miciak has been a dream of an editor, and Deborah Schneider a model agent.
I wish to acknowledge scholarly debts: to Cheryl Walker for her groundbreaking study The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900, which, along with Perry Miller’s classic The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, inspired my title; to Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson for their exhaustive historical-biographical compilation The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849; to Kenneth Silverman for his biography Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance; but most of all to Edgar Allan Poe himself for a life so bizarre and fascinating he made it effortless for my imagination to take that one further, fatal, leap.
Dave Dobson knows how much he has brought to this novel—and to my life and writing career—time, energy, endless encouragement, and absolutely vital contributions to the plot. Other members of my family—Lisa Dobson Kohomban, David McKinley Dobson, Rebecca Dobson, Jeremy Kohomban, Myriam Denoncourt Dobson, Bill Cosgrove, Nicky, Serena, and Shea—provide love and laughter and continual interesting developments.
Thank you all.