Title: Walt Whitman to William Livingston Alden, 27 August 1868
Date: August 27, 1868
Whitman Archive ID: hsp.00008
Source: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:40. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad
Washington,
August 27, 1868.
My dear Mr. Alden:1
Would the enclosed be considered opportune—& of use to you for The Citizen? As it has been printed before, it would not be proper to put "For The Citizen" over it—but just print it plainly. Of course it is gratuitous—& I accompany it with best respects to yourself. I have not forgotten your kind invitations to furnish an original piece for the paper—& hope one day to have something which will be suitable. I am writing very little lately. Should you print the piece, I wish you to do me the favor to send ten copies by mail to my address here.
Walt Whitman
Attorney General's Office
1. For Alden, see Walt Whitman's undated 1867 letter to William D. O'Connor. According to Rollo G. Silver, "A Broadway Pageant," which had been published in Drum-Taps, was reprinted on September 5, 1868, in the Citizen; see Silver, "Thirty-One Letters of Walt Whitman," American Literature 8.4 (January 1937), 420. [back]