Am glad to see by a morning journal that you are well enough to undertake a visit to New York, and the delivery of your address on Lincoln.1 If you have no better place to go, I shall be happy to give you shelter under my roof no 15, East Seventy-fourth St, where I think you spent an hour some years ago. In any event, I hope to hear your address, and to see you at my office. I am anxious to have one or more contributions from you for my Cyclopedia for which we pay ten dollars, per printed page. Will you suggest some that you would like to write? Prospectus enclosed.
Very faithfully yours, Jas. Grant WilsonWalt Whitman Esq
loc_vm.01517_large.jpg loc_vm.01518_large.jpg loc_vm.01519_large.jpgPS I can offer you a large chamber on the second floor, with a bathroom connected with it, for your exclusive use. W.
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.