Original records created by the Special Collections Department, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College; revised and expanded by the Walt Whitman Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Encoded Archival Description completed with the assistance of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the University of Nebraska Research Council, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This catalog was created, in part, from digital images of the original manuscripts obtained by The Walt Whitman Archive. The original papers and finding aid are held in the Special Collections Department, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College.
The Albert M. Bender collection at Mills College contains three Walt Whitman manuscripts: a postal card, a prose manuscript, and a poetry manuscript. As the prose manuscript did not lead to a published work, this catalog includes an item-level description of only the document deemed a poetry manuscript.
Albert M. Bender was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1866 and died in San Francisco, California in 1941. He came to San Francisco when he was sixteen and started out as an errand boy in the insurance business. Bender was an insurance broker by profession, a patron of the arts, and trustee of Mills College. He was so widely known and respected that a letter addressed simply "Saint Albert of San Francisco" once reached him through the U.S. Mail. He had friends of distinguished reputation throughout California and indeed throughout the world.
For additional biographical information, see "Walt Whitman", by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, and the chronology of Whitman's Life.
