Yours of 21 & the Transcripts & the Scotch papers rec'd—thanks for all—I have written you quite copiously lately—I continue well for me—all the little Herald pieces1 will appear (with misprints corrected) in November Boughs2—two things the reason why of this card. Dont let your Wilson book3 go to press till you have read the proofs. 2d—please enclose to me the Alabama letter, to be return'd to you4—dont mind its malignance—the blizzard & its immediate results all over here—dark and rainy now—I am sitting here alone in the big chair—
W WCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).