"What could make for livelier reading than the correspondence between a pornographer and the devil? That's the way these letters would have been viewed if published at the time they were written. . . . The sap and spirit of this pair keep this scholarly edition bristling."--Washington Post "Compendious. . . . Although there have been some notable comradeships in the national letters--Hawthorne and Melville, Mark Twain and Howells, for example--none have been more publicly influential than this one."--The Nation