Walt Whitman's Early Fiction in Periodicals: Over 250 Newly Discovered Reprints

Abstract

In an introductory note to Collect, Walt Whitman composed special word-a disclaimer-about the short fiction he reprinted in Pieces in Early Youth, stories that he had written approximately fifty years earlier, when, according to the poet, tried my 'prentice hand at recording- (I was then quite an 'abolitionist' and advocate of the 'temperance' and 'anti-capital-punishment' causes).1 W hitman went on to sum up his feelings about those early short stories, writing: My serious wish were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly in oblivion-but to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue . . . I have, with some qualms, tack'd them on here.2 Whitman suggests, therefore, that he is reluctantly, even if purposefully, reprinting the tales. In another, more amusing anecdote, Whitman similarly distanced himself from Franklin Evans, or Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, his only novel, written at the age of twenty-three. In 1888, just four years before his death, W hitman explained to his friend and biographer Horace Traubel how he came to write Franklin Evans. Reflecting on the temperance tale he had composed in 1842, Whitman stated, set to work at once ardently on it (with the help of a bottle of port).3 This was not the only time Whitman insisted that intemperance inspired the volume's sobering principles. According to a friend of the poet's, J. G. Schumaker, W hitman once claimed to have written the book under the influence of gin cocktails. In yet another version of the story, Whitman said he relied on whiskey cocktails to finish the novel.4 W hitman also call Franklin Evans damned rot-rot of the worst sort-not insincere, perhaps, but rot, nevertheless.5 But rot or not, despite the poet's dismissal of the novel, it sold approximately 20,000 copies, which was more than any of the other works Whitman published in his lifetime.6The sizable readership of Franklin Evans, its sensational plot events, and a recent scholarly edition have led to new critical perspectives on the novel. Whitman's short fiction, however, has long been neglected even though, as I hope to show, the publication history of those pieces may help explain the popularity of the poet's temperance novel. There has been less attention given to Whitman's short fiction not only because of the poet's own desire to allow it to be dropp'd in oblivion, but also because, in the words of Whitman's biographer Henr y Seidel Canby, 'melodramatic' is too weak a word to describe its incidents and characters, 'sentimental' too mild to define its morality, and 'tripe' too gentle a name for its eloquence.7 All of Whitman's short stories were, as Canby succinctly put it: terrible, and Thomas L. Brasher, editor of Early Poetry and the Fiction, a volume of Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, even went so far as to state, The plain fact is that Whitman had no talent for fiction.8Until now, there has been little evidence to support a more favorable statement that a proud young Walter Whitman made about those very short stories in a June 14, 1842, letter to Nathan Hale, Jr., editor of the Boston Miscellany: My stories, I believe, have been pretty popular, and extracted liberally.9 Here, it is imperative to acknowledge that scholars, most notably Thomas L. Brasher, have collected citations for previously discovered reprints of Whitman's early fiction and his temperance novel-in both periodicals and books. Brasher's Early Poetry and the Fiction provides citation information for about twenty-four reprints of the stories in periodicals.10 But as David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography points out, Death in the School-Room, Whitman's earliest short story, first published in the Democratic Review in August 1841, would go on to become one of his most popular works. It was reprinted six different times in his lifetime.11 Taking Death in the School-Room as an example, this modest number of reprints is certainly evidence of interest by editors and readers in the poet's fiction, but this publication history does not suggest widespread popularity or liberal extraction and reprinting in periodicals. …