Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Francis P. (?) Church, 10 March 1868

Date: March 10, 1868

Whitman Archive ID: prc.00021

Source: Private collection of Mrs. Donald E. Kidd. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 2:22. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

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




Attorney General's Office,
Washington.
March 10, 1868.

Mr Church.1
My dear Sir,

I write a line to jog you about the proofs of Personalism. Is it being put in type? For reasons as in former note, I am anxious to have proofs as soon as possible.2


Walt Whitman


Notes:

1. William Conant Church (1836–1917), journalist and publisher, was a correspondent for several New York newspapers until he founded the Army and Navy Journal in 1863. With his brother Francis Pharcellus (1839–1906), he established the Galaxy in 1866. Financial control of the Galaxy passed to Sheldon and Company in 1868, and it was absorbed by the Atlantic Monthly in 1878. William published a biography of his life-long friend Ulysses S. Grant in 1897, and Francis wrote for the New York Sun the unsigned piece "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." See Edward F. Grier, "Walt Whitman, the Galaxy, and Democratic Vistas," American Literature, 23 (1951–1952), 332–350; Donald N. Bigelow, William Conant Church & "The Army and Navy Journal" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); J. R. Pearson, Jr., "Story of a Magazine: New York's Galaxy, 1866–1878," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 61 (1957), 217–237, 281–302. [back]

2. Walt Whitman had sent the proofs with his March 3, 1868 letter. On March 25, 1868, William C. Church reported that Walt Whitman's second set of proofs had arrived too "late for us to make the corrections & I return it so that you can transfer them to the proofs before sent" (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]


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