The artist Reich1 is now completing a large etching of you which is to appear in folio with portraits of other poets and writers in a volume to be entitled "American Authors." For this work I am expected to contribute the letter press. As it is proposed that each singer should have his favorite poem appear in fac-simile, will you at your leisure, kindly make a mss. copy of your favorite, or a portion of it, for the purpose mentioned? For the month of July my address is as above. After July no 15, East Seventy-fourth St, New York City. Mr Reich will soon send you a proof of your portrait for which you may remember that you him a short sitting last winter
Were you pleased with the article and portrait of yourself which appeared in the sixth volume of my "Cyclopaedia
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of American Biography, issued by the Appletons? If you did not happen to have seen the work, I will take pleasure in sending you the
sketch and illustration on my return to the city next month. Believe me with best wishes,
Correspondent:
General James Grant
Wilson (see the letter from Whitman to Wilson of May 21,
1879) was an editor, author, and bookseller. He was a Brevet Brigadier
General in the Civil War; later, he served as President of the New York
Genealogical and Biographical Society and as an editor for Appleton's. He was a frequent contributor to periodicals, and he wrote
or edited numerous works, including Bryant and His
Friends (1886), a four-volume Memorial History of New
York (1892–1893), and a biography titled Life
of Fitz-Green Halleck (1869). For more information on Wilson and a more
complete list of his principal works, see "General James Grant Wilson," Makers of New York: An Historical Work Giving Portraits and
Sketches of the Most Eminent Citizens of New York, edited by Charles
Morris (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1894), 103.