A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT of grunt work went into literary masterpiece-making in the days before Spell-check and Google, and yet there is no acknowledgment page to be found at the conclusion to War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, no list of the relatives, friends, monarchs, spouses, and serfs who contributed to the novels’ creation. Who compiled the research? Who created conditions conducive to decades of uninterrupted concentration? Who hand-copied massive manuscripts or typed and retyped them, edited and copy-edited and, once revisions were done, ventured into the publishing world and managed the business of book-selling?
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