Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Letters
  3. Correspondence
  4. loc.03963

Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 13 November 1877

About This Item

  • Title: Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 13 November 1877
  • Date: November 13, 1877
  • Creator(s): Harry Stafford
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.03963
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Vince Moran Eder Jaramillo Alicia Bones Nicole Gray Elizabeth Lorang
  • Cite this page: Stafford, Harry. "Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 13 November 1877." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 04 December 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.03963.xml (TEI)
 loc_vm.00095.jpg Kirkwood N.J.​ Novemb​ 13 [illegible] Dear friend Walt—

Father has been very sick and wishes to see you very badly,1 he toled​ me to stop and tell you Yesterday but I did not find you in when I was there so I thought that I would write a few lines to you; the first thing that he asked me when I got home was if I had seen you. We thought  loc_vm.00096.jpg he was dying Saturday night for a time. I had to go after the doctor about 12 o'clock you must come down as soon as you get this letter, come down on the 4 train from Phila​ tomorrow if you can any how I will have to close for the present.

Ever yours Harry Stafford  loc_vm.00097.jpg  loc_vm.00098.jpg  loc_gt.00047.jpg  loc_gt.00048.jpg

Notes

  • 1. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
Back to top