The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: James Grant Wilson to Walt Whitman, 8 April, 1887
Date: April 8, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04499
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: The annotation, "see notes Aug 10, '88," is in the hand of Horace Traubel.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein, Caterina Bernardini, and Stephanie Blalock
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OFFICE APPLETONS' CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY,
6 vols., 8vo.
63 Bleecker Street, New York,
8 April 188u
Editors:
Gen. JAS GRANT WILSON.
Prof. JOHN FISKE.
Publishers, D. APPLETON & CO.
My dear Mr Whitman:
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 Wilson
Walt Whitman Esq
PS 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.
Notes:
1. Whitman gave his Lincoln lecture at Madison Square Theatre in New York on April 14, 1887. James B. Pond recounts it as follows: "It was indeed a picturesque spectacle at Walt's last appearance in the Madison Square Theatre, on Lincoln's birthday. Just as he was about to recite 'My Captain,' a little girl, the granddaughter of Edmund Clarence Stedman, walked out upon the stage and presented him with a beautiful bouquet of roses" (Eccentricities of Genius [New York: G. W. Dillingham Co.], 497). [back]