Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to General James Grant Wilson, 21 May 1879

Date: May 21, 1879

Whitman Archive ID: med.00632

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, 1964), 3:154. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Alicia Bones, Grace Thomas, Eder Jaramillo, Nicole Gray, and Elizabeth Lorang




New York
May 21, 1879

[Walt Whitman thanked Wilson for two books, one a gift, the other to be returned; the latter request Whitman would comply with after his return to Camden.]1


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. The date and summary of the letter are drawn from a catalog put out by Anderson Galleries for a sale on December 8, 1927. The location of this manuscript is presently unknown. [back]


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