The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to the Editor, Century Illustrated Monthly Review, [(?) September 1888]
Date: [September (?) 1888]
Whitman Archive ID: med.00832
Source: The location of this manuscript is unknown. Miller derives his transcription from a transcript of the letter published in Goodspeed's Catalog, #280, 1937. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:216. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Ryan Furlong, Ian Faith, Stefan Schöberlein, and Stephanie Blalock
Camden
[09(?).(?).1888]
I sent the revised and added copy of the Hospitals article1—also the signed receipt. Send me a line acknowledging them, as I have a little uncertainty ab't my P.O. messenger.
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
The editor of The Century at this time was Richard Watson Gilder
(1844–1909). Whitman had met Gilder for the first time in 1877 at John H.
Johnston's (Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer [New
York: New York University Press, 1955], 482), and considered Gilder one of the
"always sane men in the general madness" of "that New York art delirium" (Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, August 5, 1888). For more about Gilder, see Susan L.
Roberson, "Gilder, Richard Watson (1844–1909)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). As this letter indicates, in the 1880s The Century published a series of articles about the
American Civil War.
Notes:
1. Whitman's "Army Hospitals and Cases: Memoranda at the Time, 1863–1866" appeared in The Century Magazine on October 6, 1888. [back]