America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and the Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars

Acknowledgments

[ vii ] ss Acknowledgments [][][][] For nuturing this project in its early stages, I am grateful to Miles Orvell, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Carolyn Karcher, Robert Caserio, and Laura Levitt. Miles Orvell has been an ideal mentor, giving me a model of scholarship that continues to guide me. Many institutions have helped support the development of this manuscript . A 1997 seminar on the history of the book at the American Antiquarian Society, facilitated by Joan Shelley Rubin and Meredith McGill, influenced my work in its inception, and provided me with a community of scholars on which I continue to depend, including Erin Smith, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Catherine Turner, and Melissa Homestead, and through them, Jennifer Parchesky and Julia Ehrhardt. With the aid of a year-long American dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women I was able to work on the project full time, and I was able to complete it with help of a fellowship from Temple University. At the University of Mississippi I have found a supportive and colleagial community, and I thank the College of Liberal Arts for awarding me a Faculty Summer Research Grant to make final revisions on the manuscript. Many friends have read part or all of this manuscript at some stage and shared their criticisms with me. Thanks to Erin Smith, Melissa Bradshaw, viii ] Alida Moore, Annette Trefzer, Kathryn McKee, Karen Raber, Edward Gutting , Angela Hornsby, Mark Dolan, and especially Juli Parrish. I would like to offer my thanks to Paul Wright, senior editor, Bruce Wilcox , director, and Carol Betsch, managing editor, at the University of Massachusetts Press, and to the outside reviewers for their helpful comments. One reviewer’s insight about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s charge to the reader to “feel right” helped me frame the introduction. I am grateful to the following institutions for allowing me access to their special collections: Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Vermont, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the University of Massachusetts, Howard University, Brandt and Hochman Literary Agency, and the Library of Congress. My parents and siblings have sustained me emotionally, and, at times, financially, over the years I have been at work on this book. Finally, I want to express my love and gratitude to my family: Alida, Grace, William, and Jack. acknowledgments america the middlebrow [] ...