Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is author of Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (California, 1999), Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (1993), and Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story (1986), among other books. He is editor of Frank Norris's McTeague (1995), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1990), and Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman (1975).