431 Stevens Street1
Camden New Jersey
Feb. 8 '80
Dear Young Man2
I thought to-day I would send you a little picture3 to show you I had not forgotten
you or those meetings in St Louis—I have been back here about a month, &
am tolerably well—How are you getting along? Let me know if you get the
picture all right
Walt Whitman
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Charles W Post | Care of B D Buford & Co: | Kansas City | Missouri. It is
postmarked: Feb. 8, '80. [back]
- 2. Six years after his first
stroke, at the age of 61, Whitman apparently met the 25-year-old C.W. Post on
the return leg of the poet's autumn, 1879, western trip. At the time he met
Whitman, Charles William Post (1854–1914) was a married traveling salesman
from Springfield, Illinois. He sold agricultural implements for the B. D. Buford
Company. Destined to become one of America's first multimillionaires, this
pioneer manufacturer, market researcher, and advertising innovator went on to
invent and sell the country's first commercial coffee substitute—the early
health drink, Postum—and to develop the first dry-pack cereals. He is
often credited as the originator of the prepared food industry (Alice Lotvin
Birney, "Whitman to C. W. Post: A Lost Letter Located," Walt
Whitman Quarterly Review 11 [Summer 1993], 30–31). Whitman had
stopped in St. Louis only briefly while going west, but on returning from
Denver, he "went on to St. Louis where I remain'd nearly three months with my
brother T.J.W. (Thomas Jefferson Whitman), and my dear nieces" (Specimen Days, ed. Floyd Stovall [New York: New York
University Press, 1963], 96). [back]
- 3. Retained with this letter
is the signed and dated ("1880") photograph of Whitman, which is actually an
1878 image by Napoleon Sarony ("Photographs of
Whitman, 1840s–1890s," 20, and "Notes on
Photographs," 51, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
4:2/3 [1986]). [back]