Original records created by Leslie J. Delauter for the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania; revised and expanded by The Walt Whitman Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Encoded Archival Description completed with the assistance of the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation, the University of Nebraska Research Council, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This catalog was created from the original register created by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, and obtained by The Walt Whitman Archive. The original papers and the finding aid completed by Leslie J. Delauter are held at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
The bulk of the Walt Whitman Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Library was acquired from Mrs. Frank Julian Sprague of New York, a collector of Whitmania, with additional contributors including Mrs. Charles Cridland (the granddaughter of David McKay) and John R. Stevenson. The manuscript collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, and memorabilia that primarily represent Whitman's life and career after the Civil War and until his death, from 1867 to 1892. It also holds letters and papers of early supporters, biographers, and guardians of the Whitman legacy. These letters shed particular light on Whitman's relationship with William Michael Rossetti, the Gilchrist family, and Whitman's publishers in the 1880s. Roughly a third of the Whitman collection comprises correspondence, including Whitman's personal correspondence, dated between 1868 and 1891. Most of these items were exchanged between Whitman and Anne Gilchrist, whom he called his "noblest woman friend." Their correspondence, begun immediately following the 1870 publication of her article, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman," continued until she died; this collection contains all of the known letters written to her by Whitman. The collection also includes correspondence with her children and Whitman's 1869 letter to Michael William Rossetti, through whom he sent a first, indirect message Gilchrist. Literary correspondents include John Burroughs, William Sloane Kennedy, Bernard O'Dowd, Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas Biggs Harned, Horace Traubel, Henry Bryan Binns, Mary Mapes Dodge, William Dean Howells, William Douglass O'Connor, and John Addington Symonds. Also represented in this series are letters to close friends and family, including Whitman's mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, and Susan and George Stafford.
The collection holds papers concerning Whitman's finances and dealings with publishers dating primarily from the 1880s, including letters concerning the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was published and then suppressed by James Osgood & Co. of Boston. The collection's holdings also include the correspondence and contract between Whitman and the Philadelphia publisher who picked up the censored edition, Rees Welsh & Co., notes and statements of account concerning works published by David McKay between 1882 and 1892, and documents concerning the proposed congressional bill to award Whitman a pension in recognition of his service during the Civil War.
The collection includes a small number of Whitman manuscripts, various proof sheets, and manuscript fragments. Writings about Whitman by his contemporaries include a draft of John Burroughs's introduction to the 1912 edition of The Rolling Earth, proofsheet excerpts of Burroughs's Notes on Walt Whitman, a notebook belonging to Herbert Gilchrist that records conversations with Whitman (1876), partial galley sheets (with notes) to William Sloane Kennedy's "A Study of Walt Whitman" (1881), and page proofs of Horace Traubel's "Walt Whitman's Birthday" (1891). There are a number of clippings, some gathered by Whitman himself, pertaining to the publication and suppression of the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman portraits including photographs and reprints and original sketches are included in the collection, as are engravings and printed descriptions of Whitman's birthplace, the Long Island schoolhouse in which he taught, and his house on Mickle Street. Odds and ends include a ticket to Robert Ingersoll's 1890 lecture, Whitman's visiting card, and a lock of hair supposedly cut from Whitman's head upon his death by his housekeeper, Mary Davis.
E. Sculley Bradley (1919–1967), a professor of English and American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, was instrumental in the University's acquiring this collection. With Gay Wilson Allen of New York University, Bradley oversaw the editing of The Collected Works of Walt Whitman. The contents of the Whitman manuscript collection no doubt were utilized by Bradley in the editing of these texts.
In this catalog, only the documents deemed poetry and prose manuscripts are described at the item level.
For additional biographical information, see "Walt Whitman", by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, and the chronology of Whitman's Life.
