– ACKNOWLEDGMENTS –

I owe thanks to a lot of people, he thought, hoping he could remember them all. He listed them:

  • Stephanie Loer of the Boston Globe for asking me to supply a serialized story (“Gangster Teeth”) from which What-the-Dickens descends;

  • Elizabeth Bicknell for the exercise of her editorial craft, which in her hands becomes an art;

  • Natacha Liuzzi for a little quote-hunting in libraries and bookstores;

  • Betty Levin, my longtime first reader and commentator;

  • William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates;

  • the good people of West Concord Union Church, in whose basement kitchen I was allowed to work;

  • Andy Newman, for brushing the kids’ teeth while I took notes;

  • 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.