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.

Notes:

1. Jacques Reich (1852–1923) was a portrait etcher from Hungary. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; he would later establish a studio in New York. He also worked for the United States Mint. Reich made the drawing of Abraham Lincoln that appeared on the tickets for Whitman's Lincoln Lecture in Madison Square Theatre in New York in 1887. He visited Whitman late in the poet's life and made what is believed to be the last drawing of Whitman done in the poet's lifetime, dated "Feb. 3 '90." For a reproduction of Reich's drawing of Whitman, see Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Selected Letters of Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 273. [back]