The honor1 of
Mr Walt Whitman's
company is requested at dinner:
Tuesday evening December first,2
at seven o'clock,
Sherry's Fifth Avenue & 37th Street,
to meet
Mr. Frank B. Carpenter.3
Correspondent:
John Russell Young
(1841–1899) was a noted journalist in Philadelphia, New York, and
Washington, D.C. A Pennsylvania native, he began writing at the Philadelphia Press at age seventeen and was named a managing editor in
1862. After serving as a war journalist during the Civil War, he moved to New
York in 1865 to work at the New York Tribune, which he
edited from 1866 to 1868. In 1870 he established his own newspaper, the New York
Standard. In 1877, he was invited to accompany
President Ulysses S. Grant on a world tour; Young published Around the World with General Grant, a two-volume account of the tour,
in 1879. Young's knowledge of the Chinese language earned him the position of
the American ambassador to China from 1882 to 1885. He became the seventh
Librarian of Congress in 1897 and served until his death. In Men and Memories (New York, F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), a posthumous
collection of Young's personal reminiscences, his editor and wife, May Dow
Russell Young writes: "A deep and genuine affection existed between Walt Whitman
and John Russell Young, the result of many years' acquaintance and profound
admiration" (76). The collection includes Young's account of reading the first
edition of Leaves of Grass and later meeting Whitman in
Washington, D.C. (76–109). For more information, see John C. Broderick,
"John Russell Young: The Internationalist as Librarian," Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33 (April 1976),
116–149.