Nina Baym (Ph.D. Harvard) is Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Shape of Hawthorne's Career; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870; Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America; American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860; American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences and most recently, Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927. Some of her essays are collected in Feminism and American Literary History; she has also edited and introduced many reissues of work by earlier American women writers, from Judith Sargent Murray through Kate Chopin. In 2000 she received the MLA's Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies. Arnold Krupat (Ph.D. Columbia) is Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of, among other books, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature; Red Matters: Native American Studies; and, most recently, All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression (2009). He is the editor of a number of anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. With Brian Swann, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, which won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose in 2001. Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford) is Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville; Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; and Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. He has edited a number of books, including The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader; Hemispheric American Studies; and a Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.