Joel Myerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of South Carolina. An authority on transcendentalism and textual and bibliographical studies, Professor Myerson has written, edited, co-authored, or co-edited some fifty books. Laura Dassow Walls is John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Her most recent book is The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State--Altoona. She is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (Cornell, 2006).