Text: John C. Miller, “Acknowledgments,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. xix-xx (This material is protected by copyright)

[page xix, unnumbered:]

Acknowledgments

The holographs of John Ingram's seventy-one letters and three postcards addressed to Mrs. Whitman are in the Sarah Helen Whitman Papers in the Brown University Library. I am grateful to Librarians Stuart C. Sherman and John H. Stanley for permission to work in these papers and to publish these important and almost unknown letters and to the members of their staffs, especially Mmes. Russo and Trescott, for their never-failing efficient and courteous help. I especially appreciate Brown University Library's permission to reproduce in this volume a copy of the painting of Mrs. Whitman, executed by John Nelson Arnold, which now hangs in their Caleb Fiske Harris Room.

The holographs of Mrs. Whitman's ninety-four replies to John Ingram's letters are in the Manuscript Department of the University of Virginia Library. I am grateful to that library's Curators of Manuscripts, Mr. Edmund Berkeley, Jr., Miss Anne Freudenberg, and their helpful staffs for permission to reproduce Mrs. Whitman's letters here, along with two letters addressed to John Ingram by Rose Peckham, a young artist friend of Mrs. Whitman's. I owe and offer my appreciation too for the swift and deft responses to my many requests for help to Messrs. Michael Plunkett and Gregory Johnson of the Manuscript Department, as well as Mmes. Ann M. Jenkins, Lucille Richards, and Pauline Page, of the library's Communication Service, for their many courtesies shown me in supplying requested reproductions of materials.

I offer my appreciation to Mrs. Sylvia Moubayad, Librarian of the Providence Athenaeum, and to her staff, in particular Mrs. Muriel Borts and Miss Cynthia Saccoccia, for their gracious reception and their courteously furnishing from their valuable holdings copies of materials I needed. I am especially grateful for their permission to reproduce here as frontispiece a copy of the beautiful painting of Sarah Helen Whitman, executed by C. Giovanni Thompson, which now hangs in the Art Room of their library.

Reference librarians Mrs. Eileen Donahue of the Library of Congress and Mr. Roger Leachman of the University of Virginia Library and his [page xx:] staff, especially Mr. Ray English, gave unstintingly to me both their time and expert knowledge in helping solve many problems that developed in my researches in their libraries. To both I offer my sincere gratitude.

My appreciation is offered also to Jeffrey Johnson, graduate student in English at Old Dominion University, to Lori and Bill York, Dan Decker, Richard Klepal, and Anthony Brezovski, all of whom were my students, for their valuable help in preparing the manuscript for the press.

Several letters herein written by Ingram and Mrs. Whitman were first printed in my article “Poe's Biographers Brawl,” which appeared in American History Illustrated, November 1976, and are here reprinted by the gracious permission of that magazine's managing editor, Mrs. Christine Ritter, as well as some material first printed in that article, here reprinted in my Introduction.

In their letters John Ingram and Mrs. Whitman often discuss other correspondence. When these letters are important to Poe biography, I have reproduced them. For permission to print letters written by Maria Poe Clemm and Marie Louise Shew Houghton, I am grateful to Mrs. Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts in the Josiah K. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, and to Messrs. Stuart C. Sherman and John H. Stanley, Brown University librarians.

Old Dominion University's Research and Publications Foundation, headed by Mr. Ernest Maygarden, has my deep appreciation for awarding two summer grants in which I was able to continue research for this volume and for agreeing to sponsor its publication. The Research Committees of the Department of English and the School of Arts and Letters of Old Dominion University have provided funds and personal encouragement that literally made this volume possible.

Finally, I offer my thanks to Provost Charles O. Burgess, Deans Vernon Peele and Heinz K. Meier, and to my various departmental chairmen, Professors James B. Reece, Karl F. Knight, Donald Hammond, and David L. Shores, for reducing my teaching load and making it possible for me to have a semester's leave on a professorial research assignment that permitted me to work in the University of Virginia Library in the spring of 1976.