Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Acknowledgments,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. vii-ix (This material is protected by copyright)

[page vii, unnumbered:]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

Because this edition of Edgar Poe's major writings on critical theory and our edition of his Eureka were originally planned to appear combined as a single volume in Burton Pollin's continuing edition The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, most of the folks thanked in the acknowledgments of Eureka deserve thanks here as well, beginning with the classicists Michael Shaw, Oliver Phillips, and James Seaver and then Warner Morse (who died in 1991), Richard DeGeorge, and Anthony Genova of the University of Kansas Department of Philosophy.

Burton Pollin merits gratitude again, first for conceiving the idea for this collection, second for dozens of useful suggestions he offered on early drafts, and third for the continuing reference help provided by his meticulous published scholarship.

To those we named for their work in word processing — Denisa Brown, Sandee Kennedy, Pam LeRow, and Beth Ridenour — we must add the name of Gwen Claassen, who did much of the late work on Critical Theory: The Major Documents. We also note the untimely death of Lynn Porter. Lynn did most of the difficult revisions during the last year of production of the Illinois edition of Eureka. She was also responsible for finding a way to keystroke Poe's idiosyncratic accent and scansion markings in the “The Rationale of Verse” in this volume. The director of the Wescoe Word Processing Center at the University of Kansas is Paula Courtney, who sometimes pitched in herself to keystroke these documents.

The list of libraries and librarians should include those named in Eureka: many staff members of the University of Kansas Libraries, especially Sandra Brandt, Marilyn Clark, Eleanor Symons, Barbara Jones, and Rob Melton; John Kirkpatrick and Cathy Henderson of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Libby Chenault of the University of North Carolina Library; Julius Barclay, Joan St. C. Crane, and George Riser of the Rare Books Department of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; Paul Needham and Barbara Paulson at the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York; Dale Bentz and Frank Paluka at [page viii:] the University of Iowa Library; Nancy J. Halli of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and Evelyn Timberlake at the Library of Congress. We made use also of the collections of the library at the University of the West Indies/Mona when SGL was exchange professor there in 1989.

We don’t know the name of the editorial consultant engaged by the University of Illinois Press to evaluate our book, but were very glad that he chose to pencil comments and suggestions in the margins of the copy he read. We followed most suggestions and learned from the colleagial comments. (We don’t have a name, but we do have a gender, for the director of the Press, Willis G. Regier, referred to the reader as “he.”) We’re grateful to Bill Regier for a hundred acts of tact and morale boosting, and to our copy editor, Mary Giles, for her patience and her meticulous scrutiny of our work. Her work was capably and amicably completed after she retired by Rebecca Crist.

Work was supported by a sabbatical granted to SGL by the University of Kansas and by a number of small awards: one from the General Research Fund, University of Kansas; a travel grant from the Travel to Collections Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, to work in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Library, University of Texas at Austin, where we had the special pleasure of handling — gingerly — the fragile first version of Poe's prospectus for the “The Penn” magazine; and a travel grant from the Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, to aid with the expenses of a trip to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The Graduate School of the University of Kansas twice allowed SFL to take extended leaves from administrative duties in that office to dedicate extra time to the project.

Finally, on our roundup of the usual suspects we direct gratitude toward three members of the editorial board of American Studies. In 1985 David M. Katzman of the University of Kansas, and in early 1988 Theodore M. Hovet of the University of Northern Iowa and Nancy Walker of Vanderbilt University were good enough to take on portions of what were normally SGL's duties as editor of that journal. Their generosity expedited work on both this edition and that of Eureka.