The Acknowledgments Game

When I worked in publishing just after college, my fellow peons in the editorial department used to play a game where they'd walk into a random bookstore and see who could pull the most books off the shelf that thanked them in their acknowledgments. I never played the game, and I always suspected I would have killed at it. Ever since then, I have always turned to the acknowledgments first when beginning a book, just to see who I can see. And in turn, I've become a huge appreciator of the genre.

My all-time favorite acknowledgments are in one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. In order to understand the acknowledgments, you've got to understand the book. Tyson, then a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote about the civil rights movement with a muscular, hard-hitting argument: violence, or the threat of violence, played a far more central role in desegregation than we generally would like to admit. But this is no distanced academic treatise. The book opens with a sentence that Tyson's childhood friend uttered to him one spring day when he was ten: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, where his father was a white Methodist preacher, and his history is also a deeply personal memoir of his family's experience of a racially motivated shooting and the riots and activism it prompted. To understand everything that happened, Tyson would go on to study history at Duke. He would write his masters' thesis on the events in his hometown, and he would eventually rewrite it all from a personal perspective of anguish, outrage, and pride. The making of Blood Done Sign My Name literally drew on every aspect of Tyson's soul, as a child, as a student, as a teacher, writer, and scholar. The acknowledgments burst with heart and passion. They run to eleven pages.

But long acknowledgments, as it turns out, are controversial. In 2006, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, wrote a curmugeonly piece disparaging a four-page acknowledgments section at the end of a book of short stories. He argued that thanking every member of every writing workshop you've ever attended "only serves to remind us of the underlying effort, the pain given for our pleasure. Above all, why should the writer imagine we care about any of them? Might it be (and this is the most ungenerous thought of all) that he is mighty pleased with himself--that he thinks his work is so brilliant that its worth needs some explanation?" What rubbish! Who says writing a book and receiving other people's help is painful? Also, hasn't Jack ever experienced gratitude, and the expansive pleasure that comes from discharging a debt of gratitude with a thank you? Furthermore, didn't it occur to him that those acknowledgments weren't directed toward him at all but to the people named within them--yet that he might be enriched by witnessing that reciprocity?

(Ian Jack's comments, which originally appeared in Granta and were later republished in Harper's, are not online, but you can read a rebuttal from Christopher Coake, the fiction writer whose acknowledgments so irked Jack, here).

I turned to a book by my friend Aaron Sachs for his take on the matter. He is a professor of history at Cornell and author of the brilliant and acclaimed The Humboldt Current, and he himself was criticized for his nine-page acknowledgments (which is too long by at least one name, my own, for I did nothing at all). Sachs inverts the genre's rules. He starts by thanking his wife, though spouses usually come at the end. His young son gets the entire second paragraph, and only then come his academic advisors, grad school colleagues, and research librarians. He ends by thanking his parents. And then he does something even more genre-breaking: he thanks his subjects, the 19th-century explorers whom he has just spent 350 pages introducing to us, particularly the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt: "As I struggled to find a vision and a voice, his basic human decency gave me hope, and his books helped me finally articulate my desire to blend scholarship and creativity, analysis and narrative, argumentation and suggestion, scientific precision and artistic intuition." When someone affects you that deeply, how can you not acknowledge him or her? In fact, how is it possible to produce a meaningful book without opening yourself up to other people's influences, without incurring the kinds of debts that require effusive acknowledgments?

Sometimes, though, acknowledgments don't need to be long in order to be touching. One of my favorite short thank-yous comes at the end of Jackson Lears' modest two-page acknowledgments in his fantastic first book, No Place of Grace. In a parenthesis, he thanks his young daughter Rachel for "important stapling."

Amy Reading

True to her last name, Amy Reading makes a living reading, freelance editing, and writing. She has recently completed a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is working on a book that grows out of her dissertation, a history of American con artistry. Books reviewed by Amy at BookBrowse.