Your letter of Sunday has come,1 & I am glad to get those impromptu well filled yellow sheets—write again—I have not heard any more from O'Connor2—when I do I will tell you—I write or send papers or something every day3—Have just had my dinner—a great piece of toasted Graham bread salted & well buttered with fresh country butter, & then a lot of good panned oysters dumped over it, with the hot broth—then a nice cup custard & a cup of coffee—So if you see in the paper that I am starving (as I saw it the other day) understand how—I enclose Rhys's4 letter rec'd this morning5—As I understand it, Wilson is no more in the W[ilson] & McC[ormick] partnership, Glasgow, but sets up by himself—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).