The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Editor of the New Orleans Picayune to Walt Whitman, 11 January 1887
Date: January 11, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: med.00822
Source: The location of this manuscript is unknown. It is derived from Whitman's transcription in "New Orleans in 1848," which was published in the New Orleans Picayune on January 25, 1887. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2:605. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Ian Faith, Stefan Schöberlein, and Stephanie Blalock
New Orleans,
Jan. 11, '87.—
We have been informed that when you were younger and less famous than now, you were in New Orleans and perhaps have helped on the Picayune. If you have any remembrance of the Picayune's young days, or of journalism in New Orleans of that era, and would put it in writing (verse or prose) for the Picayune's fiftieth year edition, Jan. 25, we shall be pleased.1
Correspondent:
At the time, Eliza Jane
Poitevent Holbrook Nicholson (1843–1896), a Mississippi-born poet and
journalist, owned the Picayune.
Notes:
1. Whitman wrote an essay, "New Orleans in 1848," that was published in the New Orleans Picayune on January 25, 1887. [back]