The Little Book (57 page)

Since this is a life work, I feel obligated to express my gratitude to influences over my lifetime of loving history, fiction, and stories. I am grateful to Sydney Eaton and Timothy Coggeshall, my English teachers when I myself, at my “St. Gregory’s,” was rough-hewn from the California provinces. During those years, I was profoundly influenced by my own legendary headmaster, Eliot Putnam, and deeply grateful for friendships, especially those of Mike Deland and Jim Wood, who lent names and details to this story. In my years as an English teacher I fell in the thrall of Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, and Pat Conroy; and during those years in school I have been fortunate to know and call as friends a number of distinguished writers: In this regard, I am grateful to Max Byrd, Barnaby Conrad, Oakley Hall, Richard Ford, and Beth Gutcheon. Also during those teaching days, I had the luxury of colleagueship with a number of very special teachers and lovers of the literary dialogue, among whom were Stan Woodworth, Joe Caldwall, Ed Hartzell, Bill Nicholson, Barclay Johnson, Katherine Schwartzenbach, Cathy Rose, and Barbara Ore. Late in my career, my experience at Pacifica Graduate Institute enhanced and deepened this novel in both obvious and subtle ways. I am grateful to my Pacifica teachers and classmates in general and to Dennis Slattery, Bobbi Wolf, Al Smith, Bill Drake, and JoAnn Carney in particular.

It is a great personal sadness that my mother and father are not alive to see this lengthy project come to fruition, as they were the ones who encouraged all four of their children to make the most of the superb education they provided and to pursue a life of learning and books and service to others. Deepest gratitude also goes to my three wonderful children: Nan, Bruce, and Paula have been a joy and inspiration to their parents from the moment of their births. And for her encouragement, inspiration, support, and unconditional love, I wish to express my boundless indebtedness to my wife, Gaby. This book, the fulfillment of life aspirations too complicated and numerous to describe here, satisfies at least one very simple and expressible goal: the enduring fifty-year dream of dedicating a novel, my own “something of significance,” to her.

About the Author

Selden Edwards began writing
The Little Book
as a young English teacher in 1974, and continued to layer and refine the manuscript until its completion in 2007. It is his first novel. He spent twenty-five years as headmaster at several independent schools across the country, and now lives in Santa Barbara, California.