An Ode to Acknowledgements ‹ Literary Hub

The acknowledgements are where you find juicy, personal tidbits. In The Sentence, Louise Erdrich spends the greater part of a page thanking a dictionary she received as the prize for a high-school essay contest. In the acknowledgments to Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger, we learn that the author is a member of a women's group, which is not surprising, but nonetheless fun to visualize. Marlon James won't let his mother read two of the pages in his book Black Leopard, Red Wolf. A pair of my favorite authors, Colson Whitehead and Sam Anderson, though quite different in style, both have children named Beckett.

The acknowledgements can also be where you learn about the temperament of your author, which is sometimes unexpectedly different from that of your narrator. I've encountered comedic authors whose acknowledgements are decidedly deadpan, and read whole novels without a hint of humor, only to giggle through their authors' irreverent thanks.