Wil Verhoeven and the Usual Suspects
I knew about Wil long before I met him. Wil had a big reputation in our joint field: Transatlantic Relations, focussing on the early US Republic. I had written for his collection of essays on the early American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, and then travelled from Exeter University to the Huntington Library, in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. I was amazed when, in early 1990, this stranger suddenly appeared at my desk, asking if we could do the editorial work on my essay. I wondered if my essay was so bad that, for the first time, an editor had crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of an apology from the writer! It was, of course, a coincidence. Wil had received a grant to complete the editing at the Huntington. And the essay must have been okay, for over the next decade or so, I wrote another three for him.
The last two essays arose from a conference at Groningen. By now it was clear that Wil had created an informal group of scholars. They came from a wide range of institutions, in Europe and Britain, and across the US, including the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Brown University. Indeed, Wil spent some time as Visiting Professor and Invited Scholar at Brown and its wonderful John Carter Brown Library. So when I asked Wil to contribute to Writing the Americas, 1480-1826 (the Yearbook of English Studies 2016), he looked at the cast list and noted that it included “the usual suspects, and some new faces.” It is a tribute to Wil’s scholarship, energy, good humour and sociability that the usual suspects collaborated; and he has left a legacy with his many books, and in the new faces.
Bob Lawson-Peebles
Shared by Robert
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