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WHITMAN'S JOURNALISM
WHITMAN'S JOURNALISM
From 1838, when he edited the weekly Huntington newspaper Long Islander (which is still in existence), on through the rest of his life, Whitman had close personal and professional ties to the burgeoning world of nineteenth-century American journalism. In addition to the Long Islander, he edited the New York Aurora (1842), the New York Evening Tattler (1842), the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846-48), the Brooklyn Freeman (1848-49), and the Brooklyn Times (1857-59). He wrote for many other newspapers and journals throughout his life, including the Democratic Review, the Long Island Star, the New Orleans Crescent, Life Illustrated, and, during the Civil War, the New York Times and the New York Weekly Graphic.
Originally The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman project was to include all of Whitman's journalism, edited by Herbert Bergman. Bergman compiled six volumes of journalism, but for financial and other reasons, New York University Press decided to jettison the journalism volumes from The Collected Writings. The volumes are now being published by Peter Lang, and the first one appeared in 1998, the second in 2003; they are on reserve in the library. (God knows what will happen to the four or five volumes still to come.) The Lang volumes are being marketed as part of The Collected Writings, although they have nothing to do with the New York University Press series (they have been issued in identical size and same binding as the NYU books). This is an object lesson in what happens to half-century monumental textual projects. The vast New York University Press Collected Writings project will end having published the most fragmentary scraps of Whitman's handwriting while ignoring some of the most fascinating of all of Whitman's writing: his newspaper editorials and reviews tell us more about his political and aesthetic thoughts during the formative period of Leaves than any other material we have. As things now stand, if one of Whitman's manuscripts happened to get published in a newspaper, it won't appear in the NYU Collected Writings; if it did not get published, it does appear! The Collected Writings is, at least, creating a unique definition of what constitutes an author's "collected writings." At any rate, to get at Whitman's fascinating journalism you must do some compiling, and you must face the fact that much of his journalistic writing simply remains inaccessible, unless and until the Peter Lang volumes are published—and that will be many years, if it happens at all.
The first two Lang volumes are, however, well-edited and promising. They take us from Whitman’s very earliest extant piece in the 1834 New York Mirror (Whitman was all of fifteen years old and was writing for the Long Island Patriot and Star as early as 1831 or 1832 when he was twelve!) on through to his 1848 journalism in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
The Walt Whitman Review published a special issue in 1968 (Vol. 14, no. 3) devoted to a list (by William White) of all of Whitman's known journalism, beginning with the Long Island Democrat in 1838 and going through Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1892. This bibliography gives you the title of each piece, the date, and tells you if and where it has been reprinted. What follows is a discussion of the main sources; check the WWR bibliography for additional scattered single articles.
Whitman's earliest extant newspaper pieces after the 1834 piece were written for the Long Islander in 1838 (tiny reports on things like "Locusts" and "Effects of Lightning") and his first substantial articles--"Sun-Down Papers" written "From the Desk of a Schoolmaster"--were published in the Long Island Democrat in 1840; some of them are reprinted in Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, 2 vols. (1921), along with some of his articles for other papers including Brother Jonathan and the Jamaica, Long Island, Farmer. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown edited Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora (1950), which reprints most of his known 1842 pieces for that paper. Florence Freedman's Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (1950) prints a selection of Whitman's articles from the Brooklyn Evening Star from 1845-1846, most having to do with education and corporeal punishment. Freedman also prints some of Whitman's articles from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, again dealing with schools.
Thomas Brasher's Whitman as Editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1970) investigates Whitman's life on that major newspaper during 1846-1848 and categorizes the various articles he wrote for the Eagle; he quotes from many pieces. The largest selection of Whitman's Eagle pieces is Cleveland Rodgers and John Black's two-volume set, The Gathering of the Forces (1920). A tremendous new resource is the online fully searchable complete run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; on this site, you can get every article Whitman wrote and see it in its original context (you can call up facsimiles of individual articles and/or view the whole page on which they appeared). Important new discoveries are being made on that site every day.
Joseph Jay Rubin's The Historic Whitman (1973) is a wonderful book that uses all the newspaper files to construct an illuminating biography of a very political and principled young Whitman; Rubin also reprints for the first time an important series of articles that Whitman wrote for the New York Sunday Dispatch (1849-50), called "Letters from a Traveling Bachelor"--these pieces deal with Long Island geography, history, and economics. Holloway, in the Uncollected Poetry and Prose, reprints quite a few Whitman pieces from the New Orleans Daily Crescent, recording Whitman's impressions of his one journey to the South, and some pieces--including Whitman's 1851 series called "Letters from Paumanok"--from the New York Evening Post. Holloway and Ralph Adimari edited New York Dissected (1936), which reprints all of Whitman's articles in Life Illustrated (1855-56)--on things like the opera, Dr. Abbott's Egypt Museum, New York architecture, and the slave trade--along with some of the early newspaper reviews of Leaves. Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz, in I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, offer a modest selection from Whitman's vast output for that paper from 1856-1859. Holloway's Uncollected Poetry and Prose includes Whitman's series of "Brooklyniana," a long series of articles tracing the history, geography, and current condition of Brooklyn, originally in the Brooklyn Standard in 1861-62.
Charles Glicksberg's Walt Whitman and the Civil War (1933) prints Whitman's 1862 series of articles about New York City that he wrote for the New York Leader; the series is called "City Photographs" and contains his long descriptions of Broadway Hospital and of the Bowery (including the Old Theatre). Whitman's New York Times Civil War pieces (1863-65) eventually became sections of Specimen Days--Floyd Stovall's edition of Prose Works 1892 gives the details, including the original newspaper versions (one important article that Stovall missed is printed in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review [Winter 1984]). Other Civil War newspaper articles, these from the Brooklyn Daily Union, are in Holloway's Uncollected Poetry and Prose and in Glicksburg's Whitman and the Civil War (an article about the war career of Whitman's brother George).
Most of Whitman's postbellum newspaper pieces ended up in some form in his various collections of prose--Specimen Days, Collect, November Boughs, Good-Bye My Fancy. Stovall's Prose Works 1892 gives you all the citations and allows you to reconstruct the original newspaper articles. A couple of Whitman's 1873 New York Daily Graphic pieces, not collected, appear in Holloway's Uncollected Poetry and Prose.
Ezra Greenspan's Walt Whitman and the American Reader (1990) offers an excellent contextual study of Whitman in the age of explosive developments in American printing and journalism.