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Walt Whitman to Richard Watson Gilder, 1 December 1886

 loc.02211.001_large.jpg My dear Gilder

If entirely convenient have the magazine sent me by mail here—have the Nov. and Dec. no's sent.1—I am ab't as usual—in good heart but badly paralyzed.

Walt Whitman  loc.02211.002_large.jpg

Correspondent:
Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909) was the assistant editor of Scribner's Monthly from 1870 to 1881 and editor of its successor, The Century, from 1881 until his death. Whitman had met Gilder for the first time in 1877 at John H. Johnston's (Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer [New York: New York University Press, 1955], 482). Whitman attended a reception and tea given by Gilder after William Cullen Bryant's funeral on June 14; see "A Poet's Recreation" in the New York Tribune, July 4, 1878. Whitman considered Gilder one of the "always sane men in the general madness" of "that New York art delirium" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, August 5, 1888). For more about Gilder, see Susan L. Roberson, "Gilder, Richard Watson (1844–1909)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).


Notes

  • 1. The first two installments of "Abraham Lincoln: A History," by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, appeared in November and December. [back]
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