Biography is a collaboration with the past, with the biographers and historians who have gone before, and this book is no exception. Estlin’s first biographer, Howard Norman, who wrote The Magic-Maker in the late 1950s with his subject perched roguishly on his shoulder, did a lovely job. I am in debt to him for much of his analysis of Cummings’s work—coached by Cummings—and for revealing Cummings’s edits of his own story. Cummings’s next biographer, Richard Kennedy, in the 1970s did extensive interviews with everyone he could find at a time when many of the characters in Cummings’s story were still alive. He was a masterful archivist, researcher, and interviewer whose book, Dreams in the Mirror, will be the baseline for any subsequent Cummings biography—and is certainly the foundation of my own. Cummings’s most recent biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, wrote an eloquent and thorough book, E. E. Cummings: A Biography, published in 2004 and based on the Cummings papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the papers and letters that Marion Morehouse sold to the Houghton Library after Cummings’s death. Sawyer-Lauçanno, a poet himself, did a beautiful job of integrating Cummings’s life story with the story of his work. Sawyer-Lauçanno was also helpful to me in person, sharing research and insights into Cummings’s life. In telling E. E. Cummings’s story I stand on all their shoulders. I have been enlightened by their research and insights, their descriptions, and their storytelling.
My personal thanks begin with my father, who introduced me to his friend Estlin in stories and then in real life. My son Warren who, fortunately for me, is between college and graduate school, was an immeasurable help. He read and reread the manuscript and the poems, editing and re-editing until they were correct. Ingrid Sterner also did a masterful job of editing and fact-checking. Kevin Bourke and Patrick Dillon at Pantheon did astonishing work above and beyond the normal call of duty. Bob Morris and Ira Silverberg somehow came up with the idea that I should write about Cummings, and my extraordinary, adorable, and loving agent, Gail Hochman, supported the idea.
I am also indebted to the Houghton Library at Harvard, and to many others who have written brilliantly about Cummings: Richard Kostelanetz, Hildegarde Watson, Catherine Reef, and Wyatt Mason among others. Aileen Gural, who lives with her lovely family in Cummings’s former house in Greenwich Village, was astonishingly generous in opening her home and in finding people who remembered him.
My friends, my spiritual Board of Trustees, and my family all make it possible for me to write. The world I live in—New York in the twenty-first century—is a rich and thrilling place for a writer. My lovely editor Victoria Wilson was a brilliant and supportive part of the book. Thank you all!