The Big One | NORTON ANTHOLOGY FOUNDER M. H. ABRAMS HANDS HIS LITERARY LANDMARK OVER TO THE NEXT GENERATION

a SINGLE VOLUME WEIGHS ABOUT four-and-a-half pounds, but it feels much heavier in your backpack as you head up Libe Slope to class. For many English majors, the Norton Anthology of English Literature represents the best physical--and mental--workout they'll get during their undergraduate years. Since 1962, the anthology has been the standard text in English survey courses, covering British literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in two thick volumes.While the selection of contributors has evolved over time, certain names are constants: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats. And Abrams.

M.H. ("Mike") Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of English emeritus, has served as the anthology's general editor from the first edition through the seventh. But for the new eighth edition, the ninety-threeyear- old Abrams passed the torch--and the responsibility of squeezing English literary history into just over 6,000 pages-- to Harvard professor and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt.When Abrams first accepted the position, he never expected it to turn into the job of a lifetime. "I thought that we'd get the anthology done in about a year, and the thing would have fair sales for about a decade or so," says Abrams, who continues to advise as editor emeritus. "Instead of a year, it took four years, and instead of lasting a decade, it seems to have become eternal."

More than eight million copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature have been printed over the last forty-four years, a remarkable run for a book that began as a deeply unfashionable enterprise. In the mid-1950s, when the W.W. Norton Company asked Abrams to edit the first anthology, the field of literary studies was dominated by New Criticism, a movement that urged readers to disregard historical and cultural background and focus solely on close reading of individual texts. As a graduate student at Cambridge before World War II, Abrams had studied with the movement's founder, I. A. Richards, but he was unconvinced.When he landed a position at Cornell after the war, Abrams designed a survey class that placed English literary works and authors back in context. "I was certainly swimming against the current," he says. "It was the revival of an older mode of teaching literature."

But that was exactly what Norton wanted. Earlier anthologies were typically put together by one or two editors. Abrams asked six other scholars to join him, dividing up the work by literary period so that each would select texts and write introductions for his own area of expertise. (Abrams assigned himself the Romantic period, the subject of his classic study The Mirror and the Lamp.) And he told his co-editors to take seriously the task of writing for undergraduates and those who teach them.

The formula clicked. "It was perfectly clear from the minute that the anthology became available that it would be greeted enthusiastically by teachers of English literature," Abrams recalls. He received a flood of compliments from teachers and students--along with suggested changes. Abrams surveyed instructors on texts to add or drop for succeeding editions. Over the years, the anthology grew, and women writers and authors from beyond the British Isles, such as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, now share space with Milton and Dickens.

"There's a leading and a following that goes on with this book," says Julia Reidhead, vice president of W. W. Norton and only the second editor at the company to work with Abrams during the anthology's history. "We follow in the sense that we listen closely to what teachers want to teach. There's a leading in the sense that we have an editorial group of scholars who are in touch with the latest movements in their fields and are able to bring that excitement to the work."

The first edition had fewer than 2,000 pages per volume, printed on the same ultra-thin stock used for Bibles. ("It's not cigarette paper,"Abrams says, but he concedes that a few desperate English majors may have used it as such.) When the page count reached 3,000, "we hit the limits of physics," Abrams says. "The books would just fall apart if we tried to make them any longer." Today the anthology can be purchased in six volumes, split according to literary period, but the two-volume set remains more popular.

While the Norton Anthology can inspire passionate devotion, it's not without its critics. Some accuse the editors of responding too quickly to shifts in literary and political sensibilities, while others say they haven't changed fast enough. The notion of the canon--a set of texts that represent the eternal greatness of English literature--has inspired much debate of late: interest in works by women and people of color has grown and many English departments now teach courses on film, advertising, and other subjects that stretch traditional definitions of "literature." At Cornell, the year-long course that originally inspired the anthology, the English Literary Tradition, is no longer mandatory for English majors. "The field of English is now so broad and encompasses so many aspects of culture that it's hard to know what should be required, if anything," says associate professor Debra Fried, who now teaches the class. "I am no longer surprised at what even senior English majors have never heard of."

Students who do enroll in the English Literary Tradition "expect to get a survey of 'the canon' or 'great works' or 'classics,' " says Fried. She's never had a student complain that the anthology is too traditional or doesn't include enough writers out of the mainstream. "And I don't think that those charges would be true anyway."

To Abrams, the debate has always been secondary to the Norton Anthology's pedagogical goal. "We had no notion at all of establishing a canon," he says. "It's clear that as the years have passed and millions of students have used the thing, it has come to represent the best that has been thought and said in English literature-- the so-called canon--but our vision has always been a teachable course."

He loves to hear about the unorthodox ways teachers use the collection in their classrooms. Fried, for example, has enlisted her students to write introductory essays to the pieces in the anthology, tailored to their own experiences of confusion and revelation while reading the texts. The essays are posted on the course website for the benefit of future English 201 and 202 students. It's that kind of creativity that the Norton Anthology was meant to inspire.

"One of Mike's many virtues is that he has always had a clear eye about what would go on in the classroom," says Stephen Greenblatt, who joined the Norton Anthology project as associate general editor for the seventh edition. When he met Abrams in the 1980s, he says, their first exchanges consisted of "genial sparring." The two scholars represented different generations, different perspectives. Greenblatt, whose Shakespeare study Will in the World was a popular bestseller, has a more historical approach; Abrams tends to be more interested in literary form. The latest edition of the anthology reflects this shift with the inclusion of historical documents such as letters from Queen Elizabeth I and artwork from the relevant time periods. Greenblatt has also overseen an expansion of the anthology's online presence. Works cut from the eighth edition were added to a Norton website (http:// wwnorton.com/nael/), where they can be downloaded by teachers and students along with other supplemental materials.

What won't change, says Greenblatt, is the anthology's commitment to its primary audience. "Mike established the principle that it's not about impressing your three cleverest friends--it's about thinking hard about what students need."

Abrams believes that the anthology "is as good for the teacher as for the students," he says. "It has enriched my sense of English literature immeasurably and kept me from being insulated in a single specialty. Nothing brings you as closely into touch with the minds of people who have lived before you, in cultures similar to but also very different from your own, like a broad knowledge of what has been thought and written in the English language."

Greenblatt hopes that the anthology will have the same sustaining effect on him that it has had on his predecessor. "It seems to be an elixir," he says. "I think that everyone should take the Norton Anthology to bed with them to stay young."

-- C. A. Carlson '93, MFA '96

Security Alert | KAREN GREENBERG '77 PUTS TORTURE ON TRIAL

wHEN IT COMES TO THE WAR on terror, there's not much that Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff and National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy agree on. Hentoff is a venerable liberal gadfly and ardent defender of civil liberties; McCarthy's a former federal prosecutor with an appointment at the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. But as panelists in a discussion on transparency and the courts at NYU's Center for Law and Security, the two ideological foes found a point of mutual accord: the value of meeting face-to-face. "I represented a minority position both on the panel and in the room," says McCarthy. "But it was definitely not a monolithic set of opinions on each side. There were nuances people brought to bear, and it was a real, conscious effort--which I think was successful-- to make it a civil conversation where people were challenged on what they thought in a meaningful way. People weren't just bloviating."

Hentoff is equally enthusiastic about the value of such events: "It's the only way you can get people, if not to harmonize, then to recognize that there are perspectives different from theirs."

That's exactly what NYU historian Karen Greenberg '77 had in mind when she hosted the event. The founding executive director of the Center on Law and Security, Greenberg leads a team of scholars, lawyers, and journalists that explores the American legal system's role in the war on terror, confronting hard questions and publicly grappling with the answers. Amid an ever-escalating war of words over 9/11, Iraq, and the threat of future attacks, the participation of informed citizens in bipartisan discussions, Greenberg believes, has never been more important. "Until Americans learn to trust themselves, instead of falling back on some easy line that takes them out of responsibility, there's going to be a disconnect, and it will always be a public relations campaign rather than a fact-based campaign," she says. "Our goal is just to get the facts."

The Center posts its quarterly newsletter and reports for free at www.law. nyu.edu/centers/lawsecurity/publications, while its public forums this spring brought together government officials, counter-terrorism experts, law enforcement officials, scholars, and lawyers to consider the scope of presidential powers, evaluate the role of radical Islam, and delve into details of the invasion of Iraq.

Greenberg is perhaps best known for her work examining one of the most contentious policy issues to surface during the Bush Administration: the use of torture during interrogation.With defense lawyer Joshua Dratel, who has represented Guantanamo detainees, Greenberg co-edited The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, a 1,200-page compilation of government memos, evaluations of the legality of torture, reports on the conditions at Guantanamo, and the conclusions of military investigations there and at Abu Ghraib. She's also edited the essay collections Al Qaeda Now and The Torture Debate in America, both published last year by Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg's arguments against torture have both practical and ethical dimensions. Brutal treatment of prisoners yields information of dubious quality, she claims, and its appeal is rooted more in an emotional thirst for vengeance than a search for intelligence. "If you separate out the need for revenge from the need for valuable information, you begin to understand why some people support abusive interrogation," she says. "There's a real sense of 'they're the enemy and we want to hurt them.' That's understandable, but that's not what interrogation is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about getting information."

Moreover, historical analyses suggest that torture undermines the legal foundations of a democratic society. "There is a need to comprehend the human toll, as well as the 'collateral damage' to American democratic processes that has occurred as the government has wrapped itself in overt and indirect defenses of torture," Greenberg wrote in a December 2005 Nation article. "Beyond that, there is the need to bring the story to closure, to reempower the rule of law and to restore integrity to the realm of fact and its institutional guarantor, the courts."

It is those sentiments that have endeared Greenberg to civil libertarians (Hentoff calls her "an invaluable resource for keeping the Constitution alive"). But while she is a regular contributor to leftof- center journals, Greenberg resists framing the issue along partisan lines. "Republicans are no more in favor of torture than are Democrats," she insists. "It may be that people think differently about the war on terror and what that means in terms of surveillance and civil liberties. But I think that abusing certain liberties, including physical liberty, is not making us safer. And I am tremendously concerned with being safer."

A native of New London, Connecticut, where her grandfather once served as mayor, Greenberg studied intellectual history at Cornell, taught at Bard College, and worked at the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute before going to NYU to help launch the international education program. Her cramped Washington Square office overflows with books reflecting her varied interests, which also include fiction writing: she's published short stories in the Partisan Review and Confrontation, and a novel about Sarah, wife of the Old Testament's Abraham, sits unfinished on a shelf at home.

It may be some time before she returns to the novel, as NYU keeps her busy monitoring a global struggle that continues to spawn legal dilemmas. In 2004 the Center developed a terrorist trial "report card" for England, logging charges, convictions, and sentencing of alleged terrorists; a similar effort cataloguing data from all of Europe is currently under way. In May, the Center assembled a panel of experts in Florence, Italy, to discuss lessons learned from the attacks on New York, London, and Madrid, and to compare secrecy and democracy in the U.S. and Europe. "We're not looking just to criticize," Greenberg says. "It's about how to get to a safe but also sane, rational place. We're the smartest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the world. The idea that we can't win this war and do it on our terms is unacceptable. That's not partisan. That's patriotic."

-- Sharon Tregaskis '95

Basic Training | NURSE-FAMILY PARTNERSHIP GIVES SINGLE MOMS A HEAD START

dAVID OLDS WAS AN IDEALISTIC young guy fresh out of Johns Hopkins when he started working at a day-care center in innercity Baltimore. The year was 1970. The federal Head Start program was just five years old, and Olds was beginning to develop his own ideas about how to help at-risk kids. "I was a product of the Sixties," he recalls. "I thought I was going to change the world if I could help poor children get off to a good start by improving their language and development in preschool."

While the children napped, Olds wrote long letters to the man who would become his mentor: Urie Bronfenbrenner '38, the legendary Cornell social scientist who founded not only Head Start but the field of human ecology itself. After two years of correspondence, Olds came to the Hill to study under Bronfenbrenner, earning a PhD in developmental psychology in 1976.

Over the intervening three decades, Olds has been developing and honing an early-intervention program of his own, inspired by observations he made in Baltimore. Although preschool could give kids a leg up, he realized, it often wasn't enough to counteract such negative influences as physical abuse and prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol. "For some of the children in my class, it was too little and too late," says Olds, now director of the Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. "I realized we needed to begin much earlier." But he also noticed that despite their underprivileged backgrounds, some of the kids were doing relatively well. "Those children had parents who were more deeply invested in caring for them," he says. "I knew much of what I wanted to focus on had to do with helping parents do a better job of managing."

The program Olds created is called the Nurse-Family Partnership, and it's gotten some high-profile press lately, including a feature in the New Yorker in February and a segment on ABC News' "Nightline" in March. The program sends nurses into the homes of low-income, first-time mothers months before they give birth--a head start on Head Start. Olds conducted the first trial in Elmira,New York, in 1977 (his wife was studying at the Law school, so he needed to stay near Ithaca). After years of data-crunching and fundraising, he followed up with trials in Memphis (1987) and Denver (1994).

In 1996, the Department of Justice invited Olds to set up the program in high-crime neighborhoods around the country; three years later, a $10 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation enabled a nationwide rollout. (Funding comes from state and local governments, Medicaid, grants, and other sources.) Two years ago, Olds founded a nonprofit to oversee the program's administration, and it now operates in about 250 counties, with more than 700 nurses working with some 13,000 families at any given time.

Olds chose nurses, in part, because people trust them: nursing consistently comes out on top in the annual Gallup poll of the most respected professions. Also, he says, "we needed to have service providers who'd have value from the parents' perspective, and nurses have a legitimate agenda to address during pregnancy and in the first few months after delivery." Because nurses are seen as health-care providers, they may have more luck getting into the homes of troubled single moms--but the program's agenda is far broader. Its goals are not only to improve child and maternal health (particularly by facilitating connections to care providers and reducing smoking, drinking, and drug use), but also to make families more economically self-sufficient through education and employment, and to help parents take better care of their children. The latter may involve everything from encouraging them to read to their kids to advising them on how to keep their cool when coping with a cranky toddler to obtaining counseling for a mother who suffered abuse during her own childhood. The nurses--drawn from the local community and specially trained--visit weekly at first, tapering off to every other week and then monthly, ending their visits when the child is two.

As a home-based program, the Nurse- Family Partnership operates on the family's turf. That not only gives the nurses the opportunity to observe parents' daily lives and home situations, but forces them to see things from the client's perspective. That way, they can avoid being seen as experts who dispense advice from on high--not an approach many young women are likely to respond to. "Rather than saying, 'Stop drinking, stop smoking,' the nurses need to circle around and understand, among other things, what makes a parent want to smoke or drink," Olds says. "They have to learn how to listen. You can't just address those countervailing influences on behavior by saying, 'Oh no, no, no!' because it will set up a reactive stance on the part of parents that will lead them not to feel heard or understood." He recalls one young mother, a former drug dealer who faced a crisis when her friends got out of jail and tried to draw her back into the old life. "The nurse, rather than saying, 'No, you ought not to do that,' said instead, 'Really? There might be a lot of reasons why returning to that lifestyle would feel good. Let's talk about that.' "

The Nurse-Family Partnership demands much of its participants, so it's not surprising that dropout rates have been estimated to be as high as 65 percent-- though Olds calls that figure misleading. In scholarly papers, he has listed improved prenatal health, decreased childhood injuries, fewer subsequent pregnancies, increased maternal employment, and better school readiness among the program's consistent outcomes. In a follow-up study of the Elmira children at age fifteen, he found reductions of 48 percent in child abuse and neglect, 59 percent in arrests, and 90 percent in adjudications as "persons in need of supervision" for incorrigible behavior. He and his researchers are presently gathering data for a study of how the original Elmira participants are doing today, as adults in their late twenties.

"I think the key in all of this is that we're biologically disposed, instinctually driven, to protect both ourselves and our children," Olds says. "We can, in almost every case, count on that to be a fundamental human characteristic. If we can find ways of helping uncover that basic human instinct and support it, we can make a huge difference."

-- Beth Saulnier

Wild Thing | BETSY LOWE, MRP '80, GIVES BACK TO THE ADIRONDACKS

eight years ago, Betsy Lowe sat with some friends in her lake cabin in the Adirondacks. While discussing how recent ice storms and blow-downs had affected the area, Lowe, MRP '80, started to think about founding a museum to celebrate the natural history of Adirondack State Park. This July her dream becomes a reality with the opening of the Wild Center (www.wildcenter.org) in Tupper Lake, New York. "The Adirondacks are a special place and have a unique story in terms of the hundred years of conservation in the area," says Lowe, whose family has roots in the mountainous North Country. "It's a great model for protecting wild spaces."

Lowe wrote her master's thesis on natural resource planning in the Adirondacks, then went on to put her expertise to work at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. In 1998, she launched a grass-roots effort to build a natural history center for the Adirondack region; after intense lobbying and fundraising, her idea blossomed into a $30 million project that currently has more than 5,000 private, state, and federal funders. As the dream took shape, Lowe quit her job of twenty years to serve as the museum's full-time project director. "You've got to do things when they're hot--when you've got the momentum and interest and opportunity," she says.

Nestled on thirty-one donated acres at a well-traveled crossroads in the sprawling park, the Wild Center offers exhibits that range from a twenty-foot-high waterfall habitat stocked with river otters and fish to more interactive educational features such as live video conferences with scientists. "If you look up the definition of 'museum,' we don't quite meet it," says Lowe. "We don't have a lot of artifacts in glass cases, but we have live animals and are using a lot of multimedia exhibits. It's really a combination zoo, aquarium, science center, and nature center."

Lowe says that the Center's mission won't stop at the park's borders. "I hope the Wild Center teaches people about the Adirondacks and how we need to take care of them," she says, "but I also hope it inspires people just to be productive in their own lives."

-- Matt Berical