Acknowledgments

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Wild Fruits: Acknowledgments

For permission to publish Thoreau’s Wild Fruits manuscript, I thank the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. I am grateful to Rodney Phillips, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and to his assistants, Stephen Crook and Philip Milito, for their hospitality during my many visits to their wonderful reading room and for their assistance with many of the tasks associated with preparing Thoreau’s manuscript for publication. I also thank the J. Pierpont Morgan Library for allowing me in my notes to refer to and quote from the manuscript volumes of Thoreau’s journal. Like all Thoreauvians, I am indebted to Theo Baumann for his fine map of Thoreau country; and I thank Princeton University Press, Elizabeth Witherell, and Daphne Ireland for permission to publish the map and for production assistance. I also thank Bob Stewart and The Virtual Mirror, Inc., for permission to use some of the botanical definitions from the GardenWeb site at www.gardenweb.com. My good friend Thomas Siegman very graciously allowed me to stay at his Manhattan home whenever I visited the Berg Collection, a favor which I appreciate a great deal because it made my visits a greater joy than they might otherwise have been.
        Michael Frederick spent many dozens of hours working with me on this project; he located many of the sources cited in the notes, scrupulously read one of my early drafts of Thoreau’s Wild Fruits into a dictation machine so that I could proof that text against Thoreau’s manuscript pages, culled out of my typescript place names for the map and botanical terms for the glossary, and helped advance this project in many other important ways. I could have completed the project without him, I suppose—but not as quickly and only with a great deal more grief to myself and others. I am enormously grateful for his assistance and enthusiasm, and I thank Stacia Fondulis Frederick, his lovely wife, for agreeing to let him spend so much time working on this project.
        In addition to being blessed with living and working at the most estimable place in all the world to conduct Thoreau research—the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a ten-minute walk from Walden Pond—I have been blessed with wonderful colleagues. These individuals have quietly and during a long period performed all the small but invaluable favors of friendship that made working on this project a greater joy to me than it otherwise would have been. I am enormously grateful to each of them for their helpfulness, patience, and encouragement: Kathi Anderson, Margaret Norton, and Juliet Trofi (with the Walden Woods Project); Tom Harris and Karen Kashian, (with the Thoreau Society); Helen Bowdoin, Susan Glover Godlewski, and Dan Schmid, (with the Thoreau Institute); and Jeanne Barr, Frannie Hodge, and Mark Mosher (with the Thoreau Institute Technology Team of Compaq Services). Frannie Hodge I must single out for added appreciation because she was so wonderful about overseeing many of the activities of the Thoreau Institute Media Center when I was called away to work on this project. She was also gently but firmly insistent that I do my Thoreau work—and very sweet to listen as I expressed my enthusiasms for that work. I am also grateful to those staff members and assistants of the Thoreau Society who passed through the Thoreau Institute while I was working on this project, and provided me with assistance and encouragement while there: Kelly Basile, Ashleigh Fines, Mike Long, and Chris Nelson.
        Many Thoreauvians, both scholars and enthusiasts, provided expertise, assistance, and goodwill during this project, and I thank each of them. The subscribers to the Thoreau electronic-mail distribution list were gracious and responsive to the queries I addressed to them during this project. Dave Bonney, Phyllis Cole, Robert Galvin, and Ed Zahniser were particularly helpful with information that I included in some of the notes. Ed Meyer helped out with some of Thoreau’s drawings. In addition to providing encouragement on two critical occasions, Robert D. Richardson provided translations of and assistance relating to Thoreau’s French and Latin, and Kevin Van Anglen generously checked Thoreau’s use of Greek in the manuscript and my transcript of those words and phrases. Peter Alden, Raymond Angelo, and Walter Brain helped a great deal with identifications of and information relating to various flora and fauna, particularly where in the Concord area a few difficult-to-locate specimens might be located. David Wood, curator at the Concord Museum, and Leslie Wilson, curator of Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library, generously responded to my queries relating to Thoreau’s remarks about Concord history. Also, while working on this project I found very useful and encouraging the scholarship of Michael Berger, Ronald Wesley Hoag, Patrick F. O’Connell, Robert Sattelmeyer, the late Leo Stoller, and Laura Dassow Walls. I am also grateful to Berger, Hoag, Walls, and Elizabeth Witherell for discussing Thoreau’s late natural history writings with me during the last few years.
        This project also benefited from the assistance of individuals who, while not Thoreauvians, were nonetheless generous in their responses to my inquiries. M. Rosalie Fisher very kindly helped with translations of Thoreau’s French, as did Jean Folly of Compaq Services, who also provided me with valuable technical assistance. Dave Griffin, Ellen Joyce, Carleton C. Lane, Peter M. Lauriat, and Joop de Wilde very graciously helped me locate information that I used in a few of my notes. I very much appreciate the efforts of these generous individuals.
        Two good friends deserve special thanks. I got to know them while working on Faith in a Seed and was fortunate enough to continue working with them on this project: Howard Boyer, who had great faith in this project, and Abigail Rorer, whose lovely drawings again accompany Thoreau’s prose. (Abigail asks that I pass along her gratitude to Roland and Rexine Barnes, Karen Davis, David Foster, Peter and Gloria George, Susan Kelley, Dennis Magee, John O’Keefe, Martha Siccardi, Ralph Tiner, Peter Del Tredici, and Cecily Cookman Westervelt—as well as Ray Angelo and Walter Brain—for the important roles they played in her work on this project.) I owe special thanks as well to those at W. W. Norton & Company who made the business end of this project so pleasant: editor Alane Mason for a welcome blend of patience and encouragement; Ashley Barnes for cheerfulness and many small favors; and Don Rifkin for excellent, even sensitive copy-editing.
        I have taken the liberty of dedicating my labors on this project to Don Henley and Kathi Anderson of the Walden Woods Project, and to Debra Kang Dean. I have had the great good fortune of working closely with Don and Kathi for almost a decade now. I know how much they care for Thoreau’s writings and for the land Thoreau loved. I know as well how much they have sacrificed for that land and that literature. All of us who care deeply about Thoreau and his invaluable legacies owe these two humanitarians an enormous debt, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to be able to make this small installment on that debt.
        As always, I owe by far my greatest debt of gratitude to my wife and best friend, the poet Debra Kang Dean, whose patience, encouragement, and generosity have enabled me for many years now to pursue my work on Thoreau—often, I know and regret, at great disruption to her own important interests and pursuits, not to mention her far more sensible routine. Were it not for Debra’s support, more years would have elapsed before readers could savor these wild fruits of Thoreau’s final years.

Henry David Thoreau should have the last word in his own book:

I know a blue-pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey. . . . Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself—a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it . . . but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they.