The Heaven of Mercury

Acknowledgments

I’D LIKE TO thank the following people and institutions: the Seaside Institute, for a month at Seaside, Florida, where I began this book and had a wonderful time; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Great Lakes Colleges Association; the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University; the Department of English at the University of Alabama; Jack Shank, for his three-volume history of Meridian, Mississippi, which was valuable for facts and information; the staff at the Foley Public Library, for help finding documents about early Baldwin County history; my students, for reminding me of what’s important. For reading manuscripts and offering wise advice and encouragement, my enduring gratitude to Helen Vendler, Julie Anne McNary, Kim O’Neil, Karl Iagnemma, Sam Shaw, and Nell Hanley; thanks to David Gessner for urging me to get on with it. Other friends who lent support and encouragement are too numerous to name here, but I am grateful for their many kindnesses. I once again thank the members of my families — Collins, Watson, and Nordberg — for their patience, love, and support, especially Jeanine for infinite patience in addition to the rest. Thanks to Peter Steinberg, of JCA Literary Agency, for sound advice and advocacy. Finally, I’d like to thank Stefanie Diaz, Bill Rusin, Carolyn Sawyer, Ashley Barnes, and everyone else at W. W. Norton & Company; most especially I’d like to thank my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, sine qua non.

Although the town of Mercury, Mississippi, in this book bears some resemblance to my hometown, Meridian, I have taken many liberties with regard to historical, geographical, demographic, and other facts. Meridian, Mississippi, is farther from the Gulf coast, is more populous, prosperous, and demographically diverse than the town represented here as Mercury. In a few cases I have used the names of real places as they stand or stood in Meridian, or referred to real historical incidents, but their use here is not meant to represent the facts about them any more or less realistically than they might be represented in an actual dream.