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Whitman Archive Title: National Literature
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Whitman Archive ID: amh.00017
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Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst College
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Date: 1890 or 1891
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Genre: prose
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Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content:
The first page of a draft essay that was published in the March 1891 issue of
The North American Review
under the title "Have We a National Literature?" It was later reprinted in
Good-Bye My Fancy
(1891), under the title "American National Literature" before finally appearing in
Complete Prose Works
(1892). Whitman's extensive revisions are done in ink and several different colors of pencil, and the two scraps of paper that constitute this manuscript leaf were pasted together by the author to create a single inscribed surface. The whole has been affixed, probably by Horace Traubel, one of Whitman's literary executors, to a backing sheet made of letterhead stationery from the office of "The Artsman." Traubel's note on the backing sheet's lower right corner is dated 1907 and indicates that he presented this item to William Gable.
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