Acknowledgments

I learned about writing from editors Jane Rosenbloom, Judy Sternlight, Stefan Merrill Block,

and Phil Ehrenkranz. And had the confidence to persist thanks to encouragement from many

friends and readers but especially Geraldine Brooks¹, Susanne Page, Nancy Worssam, Kay

Rodriguez, Sheela Lampieti, Barbara Lucas, Tony Horwitz, and my family, David Tiller and

Ana Patel, who gave thoughtful critiques. I’m especially grateful to Bowman Cutter, who read

the manuscript nine times and was my patient sounding board and supporter through an eight-

year process. I’m also grateful to book agent Jacques de Spoelberch for his faith in my writing,

and to She Writes Press for publishing in July 2022 the first iteration of this novel, Long

Shadows. My daughter, Anne Tiller, designed the award-winning cover which captured its mood

so well. Thanks also go to union Square & Co., for publishing this revised edition. Thank you to

my union Square & Co. editor Barbara Berger, and especially publisher Emily Meehan and

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt², who believed the novel deserves a larger audience. They

have reissued the book as The Last of What I Am, with a cover designed by talented cover

creative director Jo Obarowski.

Without the extraordinary database and website “The Valley of the Shadow” created by

eminent³ American historian Dr. Edward Ayers and his award-winning books In the Presence of

Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America 1859– 1864 and The Thin Light of

Freedom: Emancipation⁴ in the Heart of America, I could never have found such detailed⁵

material about the Civil War in Virginia. Those sources, and Drew Gilpin Faust’s book This

Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, were the foundation for two years of

research. My novel is as historically accurate as I knew to make it, with one exception. The

Gatling gun, the first American rapid firing weapon, was first used in 1864 during the Siege of

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