My first debt of gratitude is to the American people for their willingness to finance this and other efforts to preserve our national heritage. Editorial work for this volume was largely supported by a generous grant from the Editing Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was begun under a contract with the United States Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, under the provisions of the Cooperative Research Program.

I am indebted as well to the staffs of the libraries in which I worked. Lola Szladits, curator of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of The New York Public Library, and her staff extended every courtesy to me during the weeks I spent studying the manuscript of A Connecticut Yankee and the many collateral documents in their care. The hospitality of Dr. and Mrs. Albert Schein made my stay in New York a pleasant as well as a useful one. Mary Gayle, curator of The Estelle Doheny Collection of The Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library, St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo, California, permitted me to copy the page proof in that collection, and photographed it herself so that it could be reproduced in this volume. The staffs of the Graphics Division and the Manuscript Division of The New York Public Library and of the Special Collections Department of the Columbia University Library all made my work easier through their cooperation. At my own institution, special thanks are due to the Interlibrary Loan Office, whose staff good-humoredly honored the unusual request that it procure numerous copies of the same title, and to the Library Copy Service, which responded promptly to exceptionally heavy demands.

Private collectors, too, placed their treasures at our disposal, and thanks are due to Theodore Koundakjian for permission to examine and collate copies from his library, to Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Appert, who donated to The Bancroft Library their splendid collection of Mark Twain materials, and to William P. Barlow, Jr., who shared his Hinman collator with us.

My reliance on the writing of other scholars is acknowledged in the notes, but I wish to underscore my thanks to those who have made a direct contribution to this volume. Every Mark Twain scholar has learned from Henry Nash Smith: my personal debt to him, for contributing the introduction and for his counsel, is very great. James D. Williams augmented the findings of his dissertation and his articles by generously turning over to the edition unpublished research, much of which has found its way into the introduction and explanatory notes. The explanatory notes have also been enriched by the suggestions of Howard G. Baetzhold, whose writings on A Connecticut Yankee are indispensable. Teona Tone Gneiting placed her knowledge of Mark Twain’s illustrators at my disposal, and generously permitted me to incorporate her findings in the explanatory notes before she herself had had the opportunity to publish them. Seth Schein read the textual introduction and gave me the benefit both of his critical intelligence and of his knowledge of another editorial tradition, the editing of classical texts. Peter Shillingsburg examined the volume on behalf of the Center for Scholarly Editions; I am grateful to him for his many shrewd and useful suggestions, and to the CSE for its help in making this book a better one. Each member of the editorial board read a portion of the manuscript; I am grateful for their assistance.

As all general editors do, Frederick Anderson offered advice, but he also showed a restraint that is all the more valuable for being rare: he offered it only when asked. And he willingly performed the humble chores of collation and proofreading to speed the completion of the volume. It has been my good fortune to have learned the craft of editing by practicing it with colleagues who are able and willing to participate in all the tasks that an edition such as this requires: in this collective effort lies the great strength of the Mark Twain project. The intellectual stimulation, the daily exchange of knowledge, the vigorous criticism to which every opinion and sentence is repeatedly subjected, and the selflessness with which tasks from the most challenging to the most tedious are shared are, I believe, unique in the scholarly world.

This book is a product of this environment, and the beneficiary of Kenneth M. Sanderson’s original bibliographic research, Robert Pack Browning’s meticulous polishing of the textual tables, and the contributions of Dahlia Armon, Michael B. Frank, Jay Gillette, Lin Salamo, and Robert Schildgen. Marie Herold patiently typed the textual apparatus.

The largest contribution of all came from three friends and colleagues. Robert Hirst read and commented on successive drafts of the textual introduction and notes, and put his own work aside to help me solve a series of vexing problems in the text. Even more important than his timely aid, however, is the model his scholarship provides of how to connect textual investigation to larger concerns of literary history. The text and textual notes in this volume are in large part a product of a continuous dialogue with Victor Fischer, whose counsel, experience, and insight inform the work throughout. Harriet Smith transformed the task of copy editing the editorial matter into a rigorous and searching examination of the accuracy, logic, and clarity of my account, which profited immeasurably from her effort.

Finally, the warm encouragement of my wife, Marguerite Adams, and the confidence she reposed in me, kept me at the task when, more than once, I would otherwise have given up.

Bernard L. Stein

Berkeley, July 1978