It was not until the summer of 2023, when I updated this list (https://tinyurl.com/TumanBooks) of my academic books that I saw the symmetry in the two distinct areas of my professional career. Although I was trained in Victorian literature, I spent my first twenty years in rhetoric and composition, theorizing how computer technology–first word processing, then LANs (local area networks), and finally the World Wide Web–was impacting our understanding of literacy while developing writing software for W.W. Norton. Then, as I approached sixty, I found myself gravitating back to my first love, nineteenth-century literature, and especially how so many of the grand romantic narratives were shaped by a writer’s early family life. At the core of this symmetry is the how my ten academic books fall into two phases: with the five recent books (starting in 2006) forming a group labeled “Literary Studies of Family Trauma” and with the five earlier books labeled “Studies in Literacy and Technology.” That is, ten books neatly divided into groups of five—one on comp, one on lit—covering almost two equal periods. Yet I also saw two other, less obvious factors connecting these two groups. The first of these was the distinctly speculative nature of all ten of these works—works grounded less on traditional research than on close, interpretive readings of primary texts. It is clear to me now that I have always been attracted to what struck me as knotty problems that lacked an obvious answer. For example, the problem I was trying to answer in my first book, A Preface to Literacy: how literacy could be so highly valued, lauded by some as the highest achievement of education, while being routinely defined as the fairly mundane task of transcribing (referred to then as encoding) speech or decoding print. More recently in The Stuttering Son, I was intrigued with why stuttering seems to be such an overwhelmingly male problem and, by extension, why hardly anyone has tried to address this matter head on; or, in this same book, with what struck me as the curious connection between stuttering and anorexia—two conditions based in the oral cavity and each with a distinct developmental component, maybe related to fathers, and each with its own distinct, almost mirror-like gender bias. How odd, I thought, that a single great writer, Melville, should have written a masterpiece about each condition, telling the stories of two stricken young men, Billy Budd and Bartley, each basically dying at the foot of a well-meaning, but largely ineffectual father! Then there is my most recent effort, The Hidden D. H. Lawrence: Unmaking a Lyrical Geniua, a project that also began with my curiosity as to how a writer of Lawrence’s stature could be so uneven, describing the sexual relations between a man and a woman both so lyrically and, in the same novel, specifically in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, so crudely, almost as if these two accounts of lovemaking were coming from two different people. In addition to this speculative thread, I saw a second matter, a master theme, running through these works, a notion I may have picked up, or at least had confirmed, in the revelatory lit course I had with Philip Roth in the fall of 1965: and that is an abiding belief in the truth-telling power of imaginative language. Literacy, I argued in my first book, A Preface to Literacy, was valuable not because it was written but because it presented an alternative way of seeing the world, presenting on a large scale, the sort of “seeing as” that empowers the simple metaphor. Likewise, as I argue in The Hidden Lawrence, his greatest writing occurs only when he found himself describing situations that reached deep into his psyche. These ten books, of course, in their own way chart my own psychic life, if not as imaginative literature themselves, then at least, I hope, as a testament to its lasting power of such writing.