Fever

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my agent and friend, Chris Calhoun, for his confidence in this novel and for a perfect New York City day I will never forget. Many, many thanks to my incomparable editor, Nan Graham, for seeing the strengths in the early manuscript, and for pushing me to make it better; to Kelsey Smith, for reading with such a keen eye and helping me find solutions when I floundered; to my foreign rights agent, Jenny Meyer, for bringing Mary Mallon to places she’s never been; to my UK editor, Jessica Leeke, for her enthusiasm and support.

From the pile of books and newspapers I consulted while writing this novel, I must single out Judith Walzer Leavitt’s fascinating book, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health. It served as my starting point and my touchstone for four years. For insight on the point of view of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century servant class, I am most indebted to a series of short autobiographies that originally appeared in The Independent, and were collected by Hamilton Holt in 1906: The Everyday Lives of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves.

I owe much to the Ucross Foundation of Ucross, Wyoming, for granting me twenty thousand acres of silence for two critical weeks in 2010. Thanks also to the Free Library of Philadelphia, Butler Library of Columbia University, and the English Department of Barnard College, where I did most of my research, and where I wrote large sections of this novel.

Of course, none of the research matters without time to write the book, and for that I thank my mother, Evelyn Keane, for taking such good care of my boys when I went off in search of a quiet place for a few hours, and my aunt Mae O’Toole for being there at a moment’s notice when I needed her most.

Thanks to my dear friends Eleanor Henderson and Callie Wright, for taking time out of their own work to read and provide feedback on mine. Whenever I found I’d written myself into a corner I could always depend on one of them to help me find the way out.

My deepest gratitude to Julie Glass for thinking of me in the fall of 2011. I will never forget how a few generous words helped propel this novel forward.

Above all, thanks to Marty, for his patience and encouragement, and to our boys, Owen and Emmett, for being such dependable sleepers and such fun, thoughtful little men when awake. When you are old enough to read this novel, try to imagine yourselves all around it: chugging your trains around my feet as I type, coloring on the pages of the early drafts, searching for Mama worm and Papa worm outside with Bobo while I try to finish and hurry back to you. I love you.