Acknowledgments

This book was more than nine years in the making, and all along the way I received invaluable assistance and support. Richard Hoffman, brilliant memoirist, poet, and friend, was the first to convince me to start the project and throughout has been a necessary source of guidance and encouragement. Alexis Rizzuto was a critical early editor; without her, I would have floundered. Grub Street’s invaluable memoir workshop convinced me I was attempting to write two memoirs and to focus on what became this book.

The late Todd Gitlin was generous and supportive. I miss him. Miles Rapoport was a source of advice, encouragement, and constructive challenges, as he has been so often over the last fifty years. There has never been a better friend. Mark Dyen has been on this march with me for so many years and was willing, once again, to help me as I struggled to write this book. Amy Merrill was helpful and tolerant.

Some of the friends who supported and encouraged me along the way include: Heather Booth, Dick Flacks, Michael Kazin, Robert Kuttner, Nicco Mele, Richard Parker, Bob Ross, Richard Rothstein, Lee Webb, and so many more. Thank you all.

This is a work of remembering and so undoubtedly, I will have made mistakes, especially as I kept no papers, nor wrote diaries or journals. Obviously, any such mistakes are mine and mine alone.

I want to thank Kathleen Aguero for permitting me to use her wonderful poem, “Hard Work.” Mass Poetry generously allowed me to steal the title, The Hard Work of Hope, from a series that they curated based on her poem.

I want to thank Jim Lance and the entire team at Cornell University Press. Without their faith in this book, you would not be reading it now.

The research librarians at the Joseph P. Healey Library of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections, and the Harvard University Archives were exceedingly generous with their time and knowledge, assisting me to track down old photographs.

Essays based on earlier drafts of this memoir have appeared in Solstice, Vox, Arrowsmith Journal, Cognoscenti, and the Lowell Review.

I was constantly inspired to keep going by my six wonderful grandchildren, Cyrus, Ben, Tessa, Treat, Seamus, and Owen, as well as my three grown children, Emma, Meg, and Zander, and my two sons-in-law, Steve and Joel. I hope this book in a small way helps make the world that they inherit a better one.

As has been the case over and over these last forty years, I would never have been able to write this memoir without the constant, patient support of Barbara Treat Arnold, who, although she is embarrassed every time I say it in public, is my companion, my accomplice, my love.