Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Coeditor of the journal American Literary Realism and editor every other year of the research annual American Literary Scholarship, he is the author or editor of eighteen books, most recently Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West, selected by the Western Literature Association as the Outstanding Book in Western American Literary Criticism for 2000, and Mainly the Truth: Interviews with Mark Twain, 1871–1910.