Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Whitelaw Reid, 7 July 1876

Date: July 7, 1876

Whitman Archive ID: med.00446

Source: The location of the original manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 3:53. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Janel Cayer, Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad




Camden, New Jersey
July 7th, 1876 1

My dear Reid:

I send a piece for the paper, on Custer's death.2 If you can give me $10. for it, well and good—if not, not. If it comes in time, get it in tonight, as earliness is everything.


Walt Whitman


Notes:

1. Transcript. [back]

2. "A Death-Sonnet for Custer" (later entitled "From Far Dakota's Cañons") appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on July 10, 1876. Reid acknowledged Whitman's note on July 10, 1876. John Hay (1838–1905), who was Lincoln's private secretary and an historian as well as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt, praised this poem on July 25, 1876. Whitman sent the 1876 edition to Hay on August 1, 1876 (Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]


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