Zack Bowen asked me, abruptly, to apply for something that was being started so I wrote a proposal in ball point ink on half a page of paper, not thinking about it for more than a minute. Heaven help us! Zack got me a year off at full pay. My neighbors in Wilmington could not make sense of it. I was not going to Newark this week, and not next week either? Had a been fired and was I bluffing it out? I had not written the Guggenheim book so this was the book for both the delayed Guggenheim book and the new Delaware Research and Teaching Fellowship 1981-82 Award. This was an astonishing gift. Most of the book was written on the Marine Science $20,000 Wang computer, which I was allowed to write on, after a time. Jerry Graff asked for the manuscript at a cocktail party in Los Angeles. It was published from disks by Northwestern University Press, after copy-editing by Alma MacDougall. I had to retired in 1998 in order to have time for the second volume of my Melville biography, a project not thought of in 1981. What a boon this was! It allowed me to make sense of all I had learned in the 1970s and be ready to move on to another activity.
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