Autobiographical Data | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: Autobiographical Data
Whitman Archive ID: loc.05935
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Library of Congress
Box: 6
Folder: Notebooks [before 1855]
Series: Photocopies
Date: Between 1848 and 1856
Genre: prose, poetry
Physical Description: 10 leaves, handwritten
View Images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Content: Photostats, made for William L. Finkel sometime "prior to 1942," of a notebook then in the collection but lost during World War II. Partial transcriptions, done by Emory Holloway and Clifton Furness in the 1920s, indicate that the photostats, which show sixteen full pages and portions of four others, are an incomplete representation of the original. Neither the photostats nor extant transcriptions bear any definitive evidence for dating the notebook, but scholars have generally agreed that Whitman must have written its contents around the time of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Ed Folsom has noted a connection between a passage shown on the right side of the fourth image and the account of the "mash'd fireman" in "Song of Myself." See Folsom, "Erasing Race: The Lost Black Presence in Whitman's Manuscripts," in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 3–31.