Spent1 last Sunday reading O'Connor's2 stories & roared in the Athenaeum over his ballad of Sir Ball in "The Sword of Manley"3 I was set aglow by the hearty, bluff humor, the luxuriance & abullience of one one of the characters. All of O'C's stories contain himself as one character. He always makes me better. Pity he hadn't written more. Yr card rec'd4 to-night This is the one peaceful hour before bed & sleep. Wife sewing cats gorged with meat stretched before grate, clock ticking. Heard Booth5 recently in Richleen—as ever.
W S Kennedy See notes Feb. 3 1890 loc.03084.001.jpgCorrespondent:
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).