Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, editor of American Literature Realism, and editor in alternating years of the research annual American Literary Scholarship. He is the author of biographies of Horatio Alger, Jr., Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Bret Harte, and Kate Field. Tom Quirk is a professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of many books, including Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction, and Nothing Abstract: Investigation's in the American Literary Imagination.