The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to George William Curtis, 28 April [1872]
Date: April 28, 1872
Whitman Archive ID: med.00699
Source: Fruitlands Museum. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 7:35. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Jonathan Y. Cheng, Elizabeth Lorang, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray
Washington
Sunday
Forenoon
April 28.
My dear Mr. Curtis,
Thanks for your kind contribution & note.1 The help I seek is for Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro—he has paralysis—& has had a miserable winter, cold & hungry—(I have myself been absent great part of the winter)—But he is now up & comparatively better—your kind $5 will truly aid in ameliorating his condition—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
George William Curtis
(1824–1892), author and editor of Harper's
Magazine, was a New England writer and orator who had been a neighbor of
Ralph Waldo Emerson for some time in the 1840s.
Notes:
1. On April 26, 1872, Whitman inserted an appeal in the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle for "pecuniary assistance for a man of genius" (see the letter from Whitman to Samuel Ward of April 26, 1872). This person was Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (1808–1886), an Irish-born journalist, actor, State Department translator, and lecturer (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 2:901). [back]