John Auchard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (Penn State, 1986), and co-editor, with Lewis Leary, of Articles on American Literature: 1968-1975 (1979), and American Literature: A Guide to Research and Study (1976). From 1985 to 1986 he was Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Milan.