– ACKNOWLEDGMENTS –
I owe thanks to a lot of people, he thought, hoping he could remember them all. He listed them:
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Stephanie Loer of the Boston Globe for asking me to supply a serialized story (“Gangster Teeth”) from which What-the-Dickens descends;
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Elizabeth Bicknell for the exercise of her editorial craft, which in her hands becomes an art;
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Natacha Liuzzi for a little quote-hunting in libraries and bookstores;
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Betty Levin, my longtime first reader and commentator;
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William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates;
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the good people of West Concord Union Church, in whose basement kitchen I was allowed to work;
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Andy Newman, for brushing the kids’ teeth while I took notes;
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the following for their collective brilliance, referred to directly, allusively, or parodically, but always respectfully: the anonymous authors of the world of nursery rhymes; William Allingham; James Barrie; Robert Burns; Lewis Carroll; James Carville and George Stephanopoulos; the scriptwriters of Casablanca; Samuel Coleridge; Emily Dickinson; Robert Graves; Paul Heins; whoever adapted the line from Herodotus into the inscription on the Main Post Office, New York City; Madeleine L’Engle; Norman Maclean; J. G. Magee Jr., RCAF; Andrew Marvell; Edgar Lee Masters; Margaret Mitchell; Alfred Noyes; Carl Sandburg; William Shakespeare, who first used the phrase “what the dickens” in print; the Star Trek scriptwriters; Wallace Stevens; Dylan Thomas; and the scriptwriters of the 1950s Superman television series.