WALT WHITMAN IS BEST KNOWN today as a poet, but he produced journalism of one sort or another for almost his whole working life. In the fast-evolving, competitive world of New York area newspapers, Whitman was a well-known figure. But identifying the pieces he wrote during his most active years in the business–even sorting out which papers he worked for and when–has proven a difficult task for generations of Whitman scholars.
A new glimpse into that world, providing some revelations not just about Whitman but about the practice of journalism during his time, has emerged from the recent work by a team of scholars at the Walt Whitman Archive. On this podcast, hosted by the nineteenth-century American studies association known as C19, I interview Drs. Stephanie M. Blalock, Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jason Stacy to get a preview of their discoveries. They put together a great podcast: all I had to do was ask questions and utter expressions of awe at the results of their work–which I suspect is just a fraction of what we’re likely to learn from them in the future.
Cohen Lab 