CLAUDIA DURST JOHNSON is Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where for 12 years she chaired the Department of English. She is Series Editor of the Greenwood Press Literature in Context series, which includes Understanding The Scarlet Letter. She is the author of two other volumes in the series, Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird (Greenwood Press, 1994) and Understanding Huckleberry Finn (forthcoming). She is also author of To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (1994), American Actress: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century (1984), Memoirs of the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Greenwood, 1982), The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art (1981), and (with Henry Jacobs) An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespearean Burlesques, Parodies, and Travesties (1976), as well as numerous articles on American literature and theatre.