Walt Whitman to John Russell Young, 6 November 1891

Correspondent:
John Russell Young (1841–1899) was a noted journalist in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. A Pennsylvania native, he began writing at the Philadelphia Press at age seventeen and was named a managing editor in 1862. After serving as a war journalist during the Civil War, he moved to New York in 1865 to work at the New York Tribune, which he edited from 1866 to 1868. In 1870 he established his own newspaper, the New York Standard. In 1877, he was invited to accompany President Ulysses S. Grant on a world tour; Young published Around the World with General Grant, a two-volume account of the tour, in 1879. Young's knowledge of the Chinese language earned him the position of the American ambassador to China from 1882 to 1885. He became the seventh Librarian of Congress in 1897 and served until his death. In Men and Memories (New York, F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), a posthumous collection of Young's personal reminiscences, his editor and wife, May Dow Russell Young writes: "A deep and genuine affection existed between Walt Whitman and John Russell Young, the result of many years' acquaintance and profound admiration" (76). The collection includes Young's account of reading the first edition of  Leaves of Grass and later meeting Whitman in Washington, D.C. (76–109). For more information, see John C. Broderick, "John Russell Young: The Internationalist as Librarian," Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33 (April 1976), 116–149.