Richard Dilworth Rust was a professor of English at the University of North Carolina when this was written. He has studied at Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and the University of Wisconsin. In addition to teaching at the University of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina, he has been a visiting professor at Indiana University, the University of Heidelberg, and Brigham Young University. His publications include editions of Washington Irving’s Astoria and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, a study of nineteenth-century literary responses to the Civil War entitled Glory and Pathos, and numerous articles on Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Longfellow, Eugene O’Neill, and Washington Irving. In addition, he is general editor of Irving’s complete works.