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Acknowledgements
Any work of scholarship is invariably indebted to a great many people. Because this study developed over decades, with a long hiatus between its beginning and conclusion, I would like to thank those people who were there at the beginning, who were invaluable at the end, and those wonderful few who accompanied me throughout the entire project.
First, I wish to thank the teachers who set me on this journey so long ago, Knight Biggerstaff, Harold Shadick, and Harriet Mills; those who taught me how to read literature, especially Rudolph Von Abele and C. Barry Chabat; the members of my Howard University reading group, First Draft Club, Evelyn Hawthorne, Patricia Jackson, Ann Kelly, and Claudia Tate; and the research assistants who helped early in the project, Douglas Ngo and Wei Min-hsiang. Others gave encouragement when this book was in its early stages: Tyrone Brown, Prosser Gifford, Tani Barlow, Vera Schwarcz, Leo Oufan Lee, and William Rowe. During that early period, I also received a generous support from a Howard University Faculty Research Grant and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
This work would have been impossible without my colleagues and friends at the Library of Congress and my unfettered use of its amazing