Merrill Maguire Skaggs is Baldwin Professor of the Humanities at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of several books, including Willa Cather’s New York: New Essays on Cather and the City and After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather. She also publishes in the field of Southern and American literature and won the Edd Winfield Parks prize for her first book, The Folk of Southern Fiction.