Generosity

ABSTRACT

The generosity of two of my University of Chicago mentors, Mark Twain and humor scholar Walter Blair and law and literature professor Robert Ferguson, provided powerful inspiration, simply because they believed in my potential and freely gave their time to me to develop it. When I once again entered a new field, guidance from digital humanist John Unsworth modeled what was for me a new way of doing collaborative work, a way that was also grounded in generosity. These individuals have shaped my efforts to guide graduate students over several decades, and this experience has also shaped the cooperative ethos of The Walt Whitman Archive.