Content:
A manuscript containing autobiographical notes about Whitman's family history. Although Whitman never published any of these notes in his lifetime, they were used, in some cases word for word, in the biographical introduction to the multi-volume
The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman
, edited by Whitman's three literary executors and published in 1902. Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas Harned are listed as the authors of the introduction. Large portions of the recto are used nearly verbatim, but only certain phrases from the verso. The finding aid from the repository lists the date of this manuscript as 1850.