Acknowledgments

The research for this volume was helped along by summer stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from Lafayette College. Some of the materials came to hand only through the help of the staff at the Mark Twain Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. My thanks to them, particularly to Victor Fischer.

At the beginning of this project, Christoph Lohmann and Patrick Brantlinger helped me shape my ideas and decide what was important. At later stages the following friends and colleagues read parts of the manuscript and generously offered their advice and encouragement: Richard Burt, Deborah Byrd, Margo Culley, Peter Elbow, Deborah Fairman, Amy Kaplan, Richard Millington, Michael Robertson, and Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. Thanks, too, to Forrest G. Robinson, and to Howard Horwitz and the other, anonymous, reader for the University of California Press, who provided crucial advice, corrections, and information for additions. For making the transformation from manuscript to book such a smooth process, I am grateful to Doris Kretschmer and Dore Brown, of the University of California Press, and my copy editor, Ruth Veleta.

My special thanks go to four friends and colleagues who read the entire manuscript and whose support and critical comments made this book much better than it would have been: Nicholas Bromell, Deborah Carlin, Robin Roberts, and Bryan Washington. And for their friendship, and an intellectual vitality that has had more to do with this book than they may suspect, I thank Deborah Brandt, Patricia Donahue, and Janis Greve.