ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I started this project a decade ago I expected it would take four years, maybe five. That was before I realized how extensively the traditional understanding of Hawthorne's family would have to be revised and began to encounter the interpretive problems that arose once the conventional picture was set aside. I have acquired many debts along the way.

Evan Carton, Stephen Greenblatt, Mary Kelley, David Leverenz, Megan Marshall, and Warwick Wadlington read large quantities of early draft and provided invaluable commentary. I am also indebted for friendly assistance and generous professional support to John Elliott, Gloria Erlich, Stephanie Fay, Rita Gollin, Karen Halttunen, Alex Hill, Joy Kasson, Doris Kretschmer, Edwin Haviland Miller, Fabrizio Barbolani di Montauto, Jan Ramirez, Larry Reynolds, Patricia Valenti, and Joseph Wakefield.

I am especially grateful to the Ohio State University Center for Textual Studies, under the direction of Thomas Woodson, and to Neal Smith, for making available photocopies of their annotated typescripts of Hawthorne letters before they were published. The Center's Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a major achievement of contemporary scholarship and will sustain future generations of interpretive study.

My work has also been aided by several fine biographical studies that have

appeared since I began work. I am indebted in countless ways to Gloria Erlich's Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction, Rita Gollin's Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Iconography, Raymona Hull's Nathaniel Hawthorne: The English Experience, 1853–1864, James Mellow's Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, and Arlin Turner's Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Biography. Edwin Miller's Salem Is My Dwelling Place appeared as this book was in the last stages of preparation and provided welcome assistance at several points. I am particularly grateful to Megan Marshall for sharing information with me that will appear in her forthcoming biography of the Peabody sisters.

It is a pleasure to thank the research libraries that have given me access to unpublished materials pertinent to the story of the Hawthorne family and have given me permission to publish photographs and manuscript text: Hawthorne Family Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Henry W. and Albert Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library; Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.; Hawthorne-Manning Collection, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.; Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Pierpont Morgan Library; Rogers Collection, New-York Historical Society; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Archivi Musei Capitolini, Rome. Special thanks are due to Alice Perry for permission to publish excerpts from Margaret Fuller's Commonplace Book for 1844, and to Barbara Bacheler for permission to publish the photographs of Nathaniel, Sophia, and the children taken in 1860.

This project was begun with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1981 and has been sustained by the research assistance provided by Southwestern University. I have also received valuable help from the interdisciplinary Writers' Group at Southwestern, especially Winston Davis, Jan Dawson, Dan Hilliard, Ed Kain, Gwen Neville, and Ken Roberts. The students in my advanced seminars over the years have possessed a remarkable knack for locating real issues.

A semester as Mrs. William Beckman Professor at Berkeley gave me an invaluable opportunity to advance this work, as did invitations to read and discuss papers at several other research institutions: the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

My wife has been throughout an incomparable loving companion. While

I've been working on this project, she has established a thriving solo law practice, specializing in family law, and has served as the president of the Williamson County Bar Association. We have seen our son and daughter through high school and college. How our lives are intertwined and touch upon the issues of this book would make another book, but not for me to write.