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Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Private Collection of Kendall Reed

Original records created by the Walt Whitman Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Encoded Archival Description completed with the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities.




Individual items at this repository

  • Whitman Archive Title: Small Memoranda
  • Whitman Archive ID: med.00790
  • Date: 1865 or later
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: currently unavailable
  • Content: Composed on a piece of Attorney General's Office stationery, this manuscript is a draft fragment of "Small Memoranda," which first appeared in November Boughs (1888), and was collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). For further information on this manuscript, see Ed Folsom. "Whitman's Manuscript Draft of 'Small Memoranda,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26.2 [Fall 2008], 122-123.

  • Whitman Archive Title: I am describing
  • Whitman Archive ID: prc.00070
  • Date: 1870–1888
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: currently unavailable
  • Content: A rough draft fragment of Whitman's essay on Elias Hicks, first published in November Boughs (1888) as "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." An image of the verso is currently unavailale.

  • Whitman Archive Title: By the pond
  • Whitman Archive ID: med.00787
  • Date: 1877–1881
  • Genre: prose
  • Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
  • View Images: currently unavailable
  • Content: As Ed Folsom notes, this manuscript "is the record of a day wandering near Timber Creek on the Stafford's farm" (see "Three Unpublished Whitman Letters to Harry Stafford and a Specimen Days Prose Fragment," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 25.4 [Spring 2008], 199). Whitman first published this material in "How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2)," Critic (9 April 1881). Most of it was later used in Specimen Days & Collect as "Horse-Mint" (1882–1883) and collected in Complete Prose Works (1892). For the complex history of how Whitman, for Specimen Days , mined his six-part Critic series on "How I Get Around," see Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works 1892 (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 1:347-351.

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