In an attempt to explain the cluster of influences and circumstances that led him to write a biography of Harry Crosby, an obscure American expatriate of the 1920s, Geoffrey Wolff said: “It seemed to me … that any story that had stuck to my memory fifteen years was trying to tell me something.”

Edward Carnell is surely just as obscure a figure as Harry Crosby, except to Protestant evangelical Christians of a certain vintage, and this preface would normally be the appropriate place for me to explain who he was, how I finally decided his story had been trying to tell me something for years, and why readers today – even those who feel no kinship whatsoever with evangelicals or fundamentalists – ought to be interested in a book about him.

However, since those questions are an integral part of what I have tried to do in the first chapter, I will not discuss them here. What I will do instead is offer my thanks to a number of people.

One of the first and most discouraging discoveries I made when I actually began working on this project, rather than merely thinking about doing it sometime, was that no collection of Carnell papers existed. Shortly after Edward Carnell died, his widow sold the family home, gave away his books and his opera recordings, and (with one or two exceptions) destroyed all his correspondence and personal papers – not for any dark, conspiratorial reason but simply because she assumed they were of no value to anyone.