Saundra Morris is Associate Professor of English and Senior Fellow, Social Justice College at Bucknell University, where she has taught since 1995. She is a Stanley J. Karhl Fellow of Literary Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing; Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time; and The Romance of America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. He is editor, with Saundra Morris, of The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson.