ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norman Lock’s novel The Boy in His Winter (2014) and his story collection Love Among the Particles (2013) were also published by Bellevue Literary Press. Recently, his play The House of Correction was performed in Istanbul and Athens; his radio drama Mounting Panic was produced by WDR Germany. He has won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities Literary Fiction Award, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts (1999, 2013), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2009), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2011). Norman lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, nearby Raritan/Lower New York Bay, with his wife, Helen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have seen the light of day if not for the publisher and editorial director of Bellevue Literary Press, Erika Goldman, who not only recognized in it a story needing to be retold to a new generation of Americans but also saw in its first draft a weakness needing to be overcome. She has my admiration and thanks, as does her colleague and the press’s founding publisher, Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., as well as its associate editor, Leslie Hodgkins; publishing assistant, Crystal Sikma; publicist, Molly Mikolowski; and production and design director, Joe Gannon. I write with an ideal reader in mind. For this book, there were two of them: Erika and Carol Edwards, who edited it.
I am indebted to Edward Renn and David Moore, whose friendship creates an interior space conducive to the task of writing. I am grateful for the examples of a conscientious and compassionate nature set by my daughter and by my son. As director of Baykeeper’s Oyster Restoration Program, Meredith works to improve water quality and increase species richness in New York harbor; Nicholas has cared for animals, wild and tame. Both have reminded me of what is due the natural world, which is also ours. Lastly, I acknowledge, with profound feeling, my wife, Helen, whose unquestioning love for forty-seven years has been the mainstay and the saving of my life.
A further acknowledgment. Huck Finn said about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly.” Likewise, I’ve given myself license to do what storytellers must, in aid of a higher truth and a livelier yarn — that is, to play fast and loose, on occasion, with history — its places, persons, and incidents. Any historians among this novel’s readers will, I hope, pardon my liberties.
Excerpts originally appeared in Blue Earth Review and Green Mountains Review.