In this section, the Whitman Archive offers a growing amount of correspondence. We are gathering, transcribing, and encoding documents so as to compile the first complete record of Whitman's personal correspondence, both incoming and outgoing. With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) we have made available Whitman's Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction correspondence. We are currently in the process of editing all of Whitman's Late Life correspondence, also with NHPRC support. Users interested in viewing letters from specific eras of Whitman's life can use the links at the top of the search box to the left. We have also provided a list of all letters currently available for the period 1848–1892, so that users can proceed through the letters without regard to these imposed boundaries. By default, the letters are listed in chronological order. Users have the option to sort the letters by both sender and recipient, or search the text and XML-encoding of the documents to return relevant results. For more information on the transcription and encoding of these diverse materials, please see our statement of editorial policy.

In addition to the annotations available for many of the letters, several introductions to correspondence of Whitman family members provide extensive context for reading the letters to and from Walt Whitman. These include:

• Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price, Introduction to the Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman
• Jerome M. Loving, Introduction to the Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman
• Wesley Raabe, "walter dear": The Letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to Her Son Walt