Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies.Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn's studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America's first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism.To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn's own work in American drama—Poe's parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold.Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor's practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn's student. Those who know Quinn primarily for the Poe biography and the edition of his poems, fiction, and selected criticism (done in collaboration with E. H. O'Neill) may be unaware that Quinn edited a selective book of Emerson's essays (1920; lately reprinted by several paperback publishers); that he early on championed the status of Edith Wharton, with a small introductory overview published in 1938, just a year after her death; and that in 1950 he published a collection, An Edith Wharton Treasury. These publications were altogether appropriate, coming from one who pioneered in the study of American literature. Just so, another Quinn book, The Soul of America Yesterday and Today (1932), was an early work in fields since called American Civilization or American Studies. His American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1936) covered an immense amount of material, at a time when such coverage had not been offered, though shifts in the canon now make this indeed an old-fashioned book—for example, in an entire chapter devoted to F. Marion Crawford, while only several pages are allowed for Melville.I went to graduate school at Duke University, chiefly to study Hawthorne with Arlin Turner. Arlin directed my M.A. thesis on Hawthorne, and he started me out on my dissertation on Poe's Gothicism. Arlin later told me that he switched from an original intent to prep for a business career to one in teaching American literature, thanks to an inspiring professor then at West Texas State College. Arlin went on to do Ph.D. work with Killis Campbell at the University of Texas. Turner told me, when my first article on Poe was in the works, that reading it carried him back to the Poe seminar Campbell taught, which included most of the persons I cited in my notes. After I came to the University of Mississippi, my first M.A. student was a great-nephew of Professor Mattie Swain, as she was when she was Arlin's inspirational teacher, subsequently Mattie Swain Mack, and then long retired, who very fondly recalled her student from decades before, just as fondly as Arlin spoke of her.Arlin Turner was one of the kindest teachers I ever met, always ready to answer a question—and not just those about Poe. His knowledge of American literature was formidable, and his attention to what would do, or not, in a thesis, dissertation, or paper being prepared for publication saved me, and many other students, from blundering. I recall his telling me when a paper I had submitted on Poe to American Literature was recommended for publication, once some revisions were made, that I should stay home from the movies on a weekend night and make those revisions. He and Thelma, his wife, were always ready to hold open house for student friends who returned to Durham, and one summer, when he taught first session at the University of Pennsylvania, we drove to my home in upstate farm country, also into the hard coal regions in eastern Pennsylvania, so the Turners could see those parts of the world. My mother introduced the Turners to that old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch meal, Schnitz and Knepp, which they consumed with pleasure.During my years at Duke, Clarence Gohdes was very much the senior Americanist in the English Department. He presented a formidable demeanor to students, chaired the Board of Editors for American Literature, and was zealous in promoting all aspects of the study of American literature, as they were then on track. He was also ready to remind students that much in the way of furthering the study of American literature connected with his own mentor, Jay B. Hubbell, the founding editor of American Literature in 1929, who likewise never failed to champion the causes of southern literature because the latter then often took second or even no place to creative writing from the northeastern seaboard in particular.One day, when several of us graduate students chatted outside the library, Professor Gohdes came along and hailed us, then introduced a man approaching from another direction, Professor Hubbell himself, who had been retired for some years but who continued to be a campus presence until shortly before his death, thirty-plus years later. Although, as a son of a Baptist minister, Hubbell was no great drinker of alcohol, his appearance was such—flowing gray hair, spiffy light-colored suit and tie, and an overall distinguished mien—that I always thought his likeness would indeed be fitting to grace whiskey-bottle labels. Hubbell placed Poe within southern literary traditions, and edited Poe's 1845 Wiley & Putnam “American Library” Tales and The Raven and Other Poems (1969) in a single volume with an informative introduction for the Charles E. Merrill Standard Editions series. Because the originals of those Poe books, along with the reprints in the Scholars and Facsimiles series, had become rare items by that time, Hubbell's book opened windows for readers interested in seeing what contemporaneous versions of Poe's creative works looked like.Because I was ultimately the beneficiary of a fellowship that involved doing editorial intern work for American Literature, and because Professor Hubbell often came to visit Professor Gohdes in the office, and because by then I was preparing a dissertation on Poe, Dr. Hubbell discussed my work with me, and we developed a friendship that lasted until his death. He was willing to be a final reader for my dissertation because I finished in summer, when many full-time faculty members were not in town, but Duke University's policy stipulated that no retired faculty member could participate in such work, so that intention did not see fruition. Nonetheless, Hubbell continued to follow my career, and his counsel regarding Poe studies was beneficial. He was also author of the chapter concerning materials relevant to the study of Poe in Eight American Authors, one of those MLA-sponsored bibliographical books that were extremely helpful before the days when online research makes so many labors far easier.One afternoon some years after I had begun full-time teaching, I arrived at the Hubbell home to find another white-haired man sitting in the living room. That visitor was David K. Jackson, who had been an undergraduate and graduate student of Hubbell's and who was ABD from Duke. Family concerns had taken David from a career in academe to decades of employment in insurance, though he never lost his zest for work on Poe. Although it was a long interval between Jackson's book—which had originally been presented as his M.A. thesis—Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (1934), and The Poe Log (1987), on which he and Dwight Thomas collaborated, David's activities in Poe studies were unflagging. Like Hubbell, David was one of the kindest persons one could meet, always extremely generous in sharing his own vast knowledge about Poe. I, and later my family and I, spent many happy hours at the Jackson home in Durham. David and his wife, Mary, were gracious hosts, whose long years in the area and connections with folks in the English Department furnished many a conversation with anecdotes that made those who seemed like formidable professors become very human and humane beings.Dwight Thomas was a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1970s, when I worked in Philadelphia, so we had some good conversations about his dissertation project, Poe's Philadelphia years, which later contributed significantly to the Poe Log. Dwight has also been generous in sharing his knowledge of Poe. I was one among those to whom the manuscript of the Poe Log was sent for evaluation, and I was happy to recommend that book for publication. Knowing the difficulties that we, at present, may have in accessing contemporaneous materials about Poe, I believe this book will remain a milestone for those who continue to find interest in Poe and his works. The Log is forthright in stating what is factual and what remains speculative, concerning Poe and his career—a plus when mythologies about this writer continue to flourish.I must return to Professor Gohdes's connection with Poe studies, a connection that might surprise many who have known him or his published work, which in his early career centered on Transcendentalism. His teaching, research, and publications during his later career addressed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century topics, most notably studies of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Thus I was greatly surprised to learn from David Jackson that it was not Hubbell who urged him to address the study of Poe but Gohdes. Of course, during their early years at Duke, they lived at the same boarding house, enjoyed frequent poker games, and were caught up in the socializing among folks engaged in English, fostered by Paull F. Baum, whose specialties were Medieval and Victorian studies, though he was greatly learned in so many subjects that students supposed he had read and remembered, “everything.” Although Baum never taught American literature, he was instrumental in getting Hubbell's journal off the ground (Baum was academic director of the Duke Press in the late 1920s), published one article on Poe's 1831 “To Helen,” and assumed the editorship of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, the last volume of which appeared in 1964, shortly before Baum's death.Through Gohdes's good offices, I became acquainted with that doyen among Poe scholars, Thomas Ollive Mabbott. These men became friends when Gohdes was still a graduate student at Columbia University during the late 1920s because of their common interests in American literature, to which, as Hubbell had, they had relocated from their original training and contemplated careers in classical studies. Gohdes was continually informed and consulted in regard to Mabbott's great dream project: a complete edition of Poe's writings. On a lesser scale, I asked Mabbott about my dissertation project on Poe's Gothicism, which led to his advising me about that project and about other aspects of my academic work. An additional boon was his introducing me to Duff and M. E. Gilfond, of Washington, D.C., peerless book finders whose assistance brought me many an item relevant to my own Poe studies.As anyone who became acquainted with Mabbott knows, he was in many respects an archetypal “character” teacher and friend, though such traits did not stultify his passion for accurate scholarship. Gohdes had showed me the paste-ups for some of the tales and sketches in what became volumes 2 and 3 of the edition of Poe which Mabbott was preparing for Harvard University Press, in the pre–computer and desktop publishing era. On long sheets, or leaves, Mabbott glued to the top section a part of Poe's own text, beneath which he pasted his own notes. From his undergraduate days, in the 1910s, Mabbott had envisioned a complete edition of Poe's writings, but because he came from long-lived stock, he contemplated postponing the major work on that edition to his retirement years. Unfortunately, however, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the bone marrow in early 1968, dying in May, just after he had read the proofs for the volume of Poe's poetry, the first of a projected ten volumes in the Harvard edition. A related problem was that although he was always eminently kindly and helpful to those who sought his knowledge of Poe, he could not work well with a collaborator on the big edition, which circumstance also delayed the project. That was simply another facet of the man who was so congenial when he was host in his own home.Let me emphasize that all of these foregoing names in Poe studies pursued much in the way of archival research—on Poe as well as on other subjects—with earnestness and enjoyment, being well aware of the ease with which uninformed persons may commit errors in their studies, no matter how seriously they may pursue them. Mabbott thought that to comprehend Poe's aims and methods necessitated a thorough understanding of the literary–cultural milieu of Poe's era, so Mabbott's edition of Poe's writings furnishes abundant annotations and introductions to individual pieces. Such apparatus places Poe within the literary territories of his own day, and although the notes don't go overboard in attempts to present Poe's literary similarities to authors of a later time, those notes often carry implicit suggestions of such bondings. Mabbott always claimed that his own scholarly work was closer to scientific quests after facts than to literary critical speculations, and his notes in the edition and in many brief pieces in Notes and Queries reveal his penchant for the fact in regard to Poe. Mabbott also frequently remarked that he thought librarians often better understood his aims and methods than many academic colleagues did.Noteworthy, too: Mabbott's interest in Poe studies stemmed from his collector's propensities. Mabbott's searching for early American newspapers and periodicals to enrich his collections led eventually to his turning ever greater attention to Poe, whose publications, in the main, first appeared in literary magazines or in newspapers. Mabbott was also an avid collector of coins and of fifteenth-century block prints, which, after his death, were donated to several museums. As the heir of Nabisco, which his grandfather, Thomas Stone Ollive, for whom he was named, had helped to establish, T.O.M., as he typically signed himself, was fortunate in having the financial wherewithal to conduct his collecting and studies.To mention Tom Mabbott is of necessity to mention his wife, Maureen Cobb Mabbott, who, with the assistance of a former Mabbott student, Patricia Edwards Clyne, carried to completion the two volumes of Tales and Sketches in the edition, for which Mabbott himself had just about completed the work for dispatch to Harvard University Press. Not having at fingertips command Mabbott's own great knowledge of Poe and his literary milieu, Mrs. Mabbott and Pat's work took ten years, so the volumes of short fiction did not appear until 1978. Although Mrs. Mabbott always disclaimed being a Poe scholar, her knowledge about Poe and his work was great, and she unearthed some facts that Mabbott himself had overlooked. Like her husband, she was ever helpful to anyone who asked her for assistance about Poe. She was unhesitant, though, in stating her dislike of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Her “book for a desert island” was Moby-Dick.The late 1960s–early 1970s turned out to be watershed years for the causes of Poe. In 1966 appeared Eric Carlson's The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, an edited collection of essays spanning Poe's own days to the twentieth century, which helped readers to recognize fact from mythology. Carlson's book made available some documents important to Poe studies but often hard to find, although some of the materials included there were edited into abridged forms, which omissions were not always specified. Carlson had also begun holding sessions devoted to Poe at MLA conventions; also, along with John E. Reilly, of College of the Holy Cross, conducting Poe sessions at NEMLA conventions. These endeavors led, finally, to the establishment of the Poe Studies Association, during the 1972 MLA, with information regarding the running of such an organization being tendered by Richard H. Hart and Alexander Rose, vice president and secretary–treasurer of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore; and by Hennig Cohen, a longtime officer in the Melville Society. Although I had used their work previously, I got to meet, thence to develop long-lasting friendships with recognized Poe specialists, such as James W. Gargano, his former student, Joseph De Falco, Burton R. Pollin, J. Lasley Dameron, and others. Thus the PSA was started—and the rest is history.I add that during this same convention Arlin Turner introduced me to two Duke graduate students who were interviewing for their first jobs and who continue to be significant presences at their respective institutions. One, Jerome Loving, went to Texas A&M University, published an article on the Poe–Whitman connection, and has since gained renown with studies of Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Twain, and Dreiser. The second, J. Gerald Kennedy, of LSU, needs no introduction to persons working on Poe projects. Both men have remained friends of mine: Loving urging me to join SCMLA shortly after I relocated to Mississippi, Kennedy graciously guiding me around New Orleans when I went to my first SCMLA convention the following year. And during a later MLA convention, in Houston, I met Richard Kopley, who has likewise become an important force in Poe studies.I shift to several of those whom I met at that original PSA meeting. Jim Gargano's studies of Poe's irony were influential in changing outlooks about Poe's tales in particular. Jim and Peggy, his wife, were also marvelous hosts to anybody who happened to travel through Washington, Pennsylvania, during their years there. I will remember Jim Gargano, not only for being a superb professional and personal friend, but also for assisting my introduction to Richard Wilbur, poet, Poe scholar, and a genuine teacher to those with curiosities about Poe's poems and fiction. Wilbur came to MLA to speak at a PSA session when Kent Ljungquist and I were respectively president and vice president of the organization, and he was also invited to give a reading and talk to the entire MLA. At a lunch the next day, organized by Mrs. Mabbott, Wilbur continued to chat in lively fashion with those assembled. At the end of his reading to the Association, Wilbur was besieged by folks wanting him to autograph books. Long before, having admired whatever poems by him I had read, I purchased a copy of his first published book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), which, when he and I were alone after lunch, I asked him to inscribe. He was astonished, asking, “Where the hell did you get this?” I told him that I discovered it, dust jacket and all, for five dollars, in a bookstore near Duke. By far most of the books he had been signing the previous evening were paperbacks; thus he was surprised and delighted with what I handed him, and I cherish his inscription. Wilbur, too, continued to counsel me about many aspects of Poe, for which I am very grateful.Here it is appropriate to furnish an additional bit of history about the PSA. The idea for such an organization was discussed and promoted originally by Jim Gargano and Lasley Dameron during one of their get-togethers at a Chicago MLA. To them, Poe had for too long been relegated to lesser status as compared with other American writers like Emerson, Henry James, Hawthorne, and Melville, and that the time had come to give Poe just dues. Both men were, and Lasley continues to be, self-effacing, and so Eric Carlson was invited to take forward their ideas. He did so with enthusiasm, although his enthusiasm was tempered by his decided ideas of what were and what were not valid approaches to Poe's writings. Because I was then a younger person who was engaging research and publishing on topics where Poe was central, these folks encouraged me to participate in PSA activities, soon nominating me to serve as vice president, later as president, of the organization.My introduction to Al Rose and Richard Hart also led to my giving one of the Annual Lectures to the Baltimore Poe Society, where I addressed Poe's literary uses of alcohol and alcoholism, thence to my appointment as chairman of the Speakers Series for that organization. Ironically, in context of the multiple ironies that swirl around Poe, I was the last speaker to deliver my lecture in the sanctuary of Westminster Presbyterian Church, outside which Poe's grave lies in the northwest corner of the graveyard—and, in the northeast corner, facing Poe's monument, lie the monument and remains of Isaac Causten, one of that area's renowned activists during the American Revolution and father of James H. Causten, who finally denied any hope of Poe family's being awarded a pension for Poe's grandmother, Elizabeth Cairns Poe, widow of David Poe, Sr., who had turned over his personal fortune to support the American Revolution. Of course, legends had hinted that the remains lying beneath the Poe monument were not actually Edgar Poe's own, though those myths were finally proved invalid by the archival research and publication of a convincing rectification by Mr. Christopher Scharpf, of the Poe Society.Al Rose's graduate study took place at the University of Minnesota, where his training in pre-twentieth-century American lit was supervised by Tremaine McDowell, who was first a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature but who turned to American subjects, producing, among other useful works, an anthology of William Cullen Bryant, for the American Writers Series, conducted by the able editor Harry Hayden Clark. Al was a people person, enjoyed the contacts he made by means of the Poe Society, was eager to foster academic ambitions of younger folks, zealous in campaigning for support of the Poe House on Amity Street, and a dynamic teacher at the University of Baltimore. For many years he and Mary, his wife, hosted at their home a Saturday-night dinner and social evening in honor of the person giving the Annual Lecture to the Poe Society. One of the most memorable of those events occurred at a special sixtieth anniversary of the Poe Society, in Spring 1988, held on the University of Baltimore campus. Because Tom Mabbott had been the first Poe authority to deliver the Annual Lecture, Mrs. Mabbott was importuned to give a talk on this later occasion. Several others, who were members of the Society, likewise gave talks, but hers illuminated Poe's own reading of “The Raven,” when that poem was new and immensely popular.The day had been extremely hot, the room in which the talks were held had sealed windows, and the University of Baltimore AC had not been turned on. So I returned to my hotel room, donned my Poe Society T-shirt, and went on to Rose's for dinner. Mrs. Mabbott remarked that she should probably purchase one of those shirts, but at breakfast the next morning, when I met her and her daughter and Pat Clyne, who had accompanied her, along with Edith Ollive, Tom's cousin, she urged me not to surprise her with one of those T-shirts, because, as she said, “You know I won't wear it.” On another occasion, I drove her to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she spoke about Poe, read some of her own poems, and was enthusiastically received. The occasion was special Humanities Series event, in which Kent Ljungquist was active.In 1973, at another, special meeting of the Poe Society, I met Burton Pollin, who was speaking on Poe's illustrators and word coinages. Because of his own publications of an “evidential scholarship” nature, Pollin had been selected by Clarence Gohdes and Rollo Silver to assume editorship of the Mabbott Poe, for which Mabbott's will constituted them “Guardians of the Poe.” Pollin published several more volumes of what was hoped would be a completed edition of Poe, but other interests and advancing age contributed to bringing that project to a premature conclusion. Anyone who knew Burton knew that, until his very last years, when he was in his nineties, he was a dynamo of energy, be that energy turned on Poe research, playing the piano, growing orchids and, when he moved to Bronxville, gardening, bicycling, or conversing about fine eating. He and I became mutually helpful to each other in exchanging information regarding Poe. Burton's last work was preparing, in collaboration with Jeffrey Savoye of the Poe Society of Baltimore, an expanded, updated edition of Poe's letters, which had originally been prepared by John Ward Ostrom. I note here that I have known Jeff Savoye for decades, and that he seems to me to be a Poe scholar par excellence, as well as the leading light of the Baltimore Poe Society.Burton seemed to be quite delighted when I announced I would be marrying—he had long since introduced me to his own wife and their son and daughter—and he later was quite impressed when he would telephone my home, to have my older daughter, then a preschooler, converse with him while waiting for me to come to the phone.Now I hark back to Washington State University, where in the late 1960s, G. Richard Thompson, who had been publishing articles on Poe's humor, established the Poe Newsletter, the first journal devoted to Poe, and one that continues, though under a different name and under different editors. That journal published articles by the seasoned and the novitiate, and the quality overall continues to inform those who conduct researches into Poe and the Poesque. I met Dick Thompson at the 1970 MLA, when we each had an article on Poe's “Metzengerstein” readying for publication, though neither of us was aware of the other's project. Dick's article—first in the old Emerson Society Quarterly, edited by Kenneth W. Cameron, then in a revise of that journal issue as New Approaches to Poe, edited by Ken's colleague Richard P. Benton—offered a comic, mine, in American Literature, a serious, reading of that tale.Whatever our differences, Dick has promoted my own work on Poe, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, have been staunch friends. Dick once spent a week at my home and on the University of Mississippi campus, during a sabbatical from Purdue, whence he relocated from Washington in the mid-1970s, answered myriad questions by my students, nightly for a week drank them under my kitchen table, and continued to be his sober self, in several senses of that word. In 1991 he invited me to the first conference of what has become the International Gothic Association, headquartered on the campus of East Anglia University. I could not close my remarks about Dick Thompson without mentioning that his emphasis on Poe's abilities and methods in creating literary hoaxes drove Eric Carlson wild, because for Eric Poe's only worthwhile writings were serious. The view that Poe's comic sense was deficient was not unique to Eric. Look back to comments by many nineteenth-century readers, who couldn't fathom anything humorous in what seemed to be blatantly gruesome, supernatural tales and poems—no matter that Gothic tradition has always been strongly infused with the tongue-in-cheek, from The Castle of Otranto onward.Mention of Dick Thompson conjures another Richard, this one Richard P. Benton, whom I just mentioned, and who was one of the original editorial evaluators for the Poe Newsletter. Not only did Benton perform yeoman service on the editorial boards of Poe Studies, he was instrumental in persuading Ken Cameron to transfer the Emerson Society Quarterly to Washington State University, with Dick Thompson as editor, and where its title changed to ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Subsequently other editors assumed the overseeing of both journals.Dick Benton was an unusual academic. His first university degree was in civil engineering, and he was employed in that field until the 1950s, when he returned to academic work, taking a Ph.D. in comparative lit at Johns Hopkins. His dissertation was a study of Nietzsche's aesthetics. He also studied Poe, and that part of his graduate work spurred him to continue with investigations of Poe topics. Benton's “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (September 1963), along with an interchange of articles with Dick Thompson, on “Lionizing,” in Studies in Short Fiction, served as catalysts for investigations of Poe's comic impulses, as did Thompson's 1972 book, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, along with many articles—his own and others’—in Poe Studies, ESQ, and other journals. These critiques demonstrated that Poe's humor was unquestionable, substantial literary art.Because my own early reading of Poe encouraged me to view his tales and poems as serious works, I gained learning experiences from reading the publications of Thompson and Benton. Because a former student of mine had moved from Pennsylvania to southern New Hampshire, I often traveled through Hartford, en route to more-eastern New England, and those travels, which spanned the 1970s, permitted visits with Benton, whose ideas about Poe, and much else, were of immeasurable benefit to me. His suggestions led to great improvements in a piece on “Tarr and Fether,” and although, before we met, Benton had rejected the first version, which I sent to Poe Studies, he was ready to help me make sensible revisions, and so the piece eventually did appear. Nonetheless, I have often teased Dick Thompson in recent years about using Benton as a bulldog to keep out of Poe Studies items that did not accord with the Thompson–Benton take on Poe's humor.In 1978 I received an invitation to reprint an essay of mine in a book on Poe's hoaxing, the editor being one Dennis W. Eddings. Dennis came to MLA, in San Francisco, the next year, we became close friends, and he eventually became secretary–treasurer of the PSA, bringing order to what had for some time become chaotic in the records area. Although Dennis would say that his real first love is Twain, and that since he retired from full-time teaching and administration he “doesn't do that anymore,” he nonetheless maintains interests in Poe topics. I mention him not just as a professional and personal friend, but as one who really did the PSA good turns when he held office.I could continue, probably for many more pages, but I will desist. I well remember Roger Asselineau's recalling his first attendance at an MLA convention at which the keynote speaker in the then American Literature Group was Arthur Hobson Quinn. The date of this experience was in the early 1950s. Asselineau said that to most of the audience, Quinn seemed to be a “fossil.” At the time Professor Quinn would have been about seventy-five years old. Because I myself have now reached that same age range, my remarks here may place me, too, as a fossil. Whatever! Many fossils have become items of great desire for their significant revelations of past history. Should this notion seem too effete, I offer another conclusion, a bit of verse I often heard in my childhood: I'll tell you a story about Mary McMorey,And now my story's begun.I'll tell you another about her brother,And now my story's done.I acknowledge my gratitude to Hal Poe for providing a forum for these recollections at the “Positively Poe” Conference, at the University of Virginia, June 24–26, 2013.