Читать книгу Twelve Men - Theodore Dreiser - Страница 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am most grateful to James L. W. West III for the continued help and encouragement that he has provided to me since the beginning of this project in the summer of 1987. My most critical and demanding reader (and steadfast supporter), however, has been my wife, Loretta, who has also now become a Dreiser expert whether she wanted to or not.

Other scholars whose helpful suggestions contributed to this project include Robert D. Hume, Charles W. Mann, Jr., and Bruce A. Murphy of Pennsylvania State University, as well as my friend and unofficial reader Robert Bravard of Lock Haven University.

This project could not have been completed without the invaluable help of several librarians, the foremost being Daniel Traister and Nancy Shawcross of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Others who assisted me include William J. Dane of the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library, Jack Rossi of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, and Joni Brookins of the Warsaw, Indiana, Community Public Library.

Numerous Dreiser scholars have very generously responded to my inquiries with helpful information. These include Richard Lingeman, Richard Dowell, Thomas Riggio, and T. D. Nostwich. The most memorable assistance, however, was provided by Noanks own Dreiser expert, the man who rowed me out to that very small rock on which Arthur Henry and Dreiser had lived in an island cabin, Stephen Jones of Mystic, Connecticut.

I am also grateful to the Library of America for allowing me to use their collations of the Twelve Men sketches. Others who assisted me include Kathleen Zimmerman of the American Watercolor Society and Marjorie M. Miller of the Montgomery County, Missouri, Historical Society.