Mark W. Van Wienen - American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois

For a study that explores the interconnectedness of individuals in human societies, and which seeks to offer a fuller account of this interconnectedness, it is altogether fitting to begin with thanks for the many people and institutions that have helped to make this book possible. Thanks are due first to my mentor, Cary Nelson, who has been unfailingly supportive from my time in graduate school and ever since.

My colleagues in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University have also been magnificent. Special thanks to colleagues there who have read portions of my manuscript during various stages of its creation: Keith Gandal (now at the City University of New York), James Giles, Mark Kipperman, and Diana Swanson.

I have also been blessed with several smart and diligent research assistants. Julie K. Kraft helped with initial research of the W. E. B. Du Bois materials when she was an undergraduate student and I an assistant professor at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. At Northern Illinois University, graduate students Sang-Wook Kim, Meagan Peabody, and Brett Stumphy assisted with research on Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign and with the voluminous papers related to the Scottsboro trials.

The institutions where I have worked while this book has been in the making have also been uncommonly generous in their financial support. My research in the summer of 1999 was supported by an Augustana Research and Artistry Fellowship, while at Northern Illinois University a portion of the work for this book was funded by a spring 2008 sabbatical leave and a 2010 Summer Research and Artistry Award. Moreover, a portion of the production cost of this book has been supplied by a subvention provided jointly by the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Graduate School at Northern Illinois University. Special kudos to Phil Eubanks, Christopher McCord, and James Erman for their assistance in making the subvention happen.

At another critical juncture in 2003, this book was supported by a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That grant was transformative not only for this book project but for my academic career. I am also deeply appreciative of a grant from the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, supporting research in its collections through an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship.

And then there are the special collections libraries that have preservedmaterials important to the history of American socialism. Without these collections and the people who have helped me in accessing them, this book could not have existed. I thank the following libraries, their administrators and staffs: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Beinecke Library, Yale University; and Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Thanks, too, to the catalogers and microfilmers at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the university library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who have made the papers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and W. E. B. Du Bois, respectively, readily available via microfilm. Not least, I thank the libraries and librarians at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, and Northern Illinois University, especially their indefatigable interlibrary loan personnel.

I gratefully acknowledge the permission of American Quarterly and African American Review to republish materials that originally appeared in those journals. For their assistance in shepherding the manuscript through the submission, editing, and publication process, I heartily thank acquisitions editor LeAnn Fields, her editorial assistant, Scott Ham, and project manager Marcia LaBrenz. Thanks also for the constructive feedback of the three anonymous readers commissioned by the University of Michigan Press and for the careful copyediting of Richard Isomaki.

For a study about social interconnections and interdependence, it is slightly ironic that certain personal acknowledgments take the form, almost, of an apology for times when the author was far away on the porch or basement study, lost to family and friends because he was so intensely invested in the lives of Charlotte, Upton, and W. E. B. I stand largely unabashed in my thanks on this point only because my family members were so generous in their support of this project. Thanks to my parents Margaret and Bill Van Wienen, my parents-in-law Eveleen and Walt Windholz, my sister, Marcia Van't Hof, my brother-in-law, Mark Van't Hof, and their son Braden. Since Mark's untimely death in February of 2008, I have come to see him as Virgil to my Dante, a comparison altogether unfitting on my side, for I do not pretend to have written a