Search >> Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work
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Bibliographic Information
Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Type: book ; Genre: biography, literary criticism
Abstract
In this overview of Whitman's life and work, Folsom and Price make the following comments about the poet's connection to Pfaff's: "At Pfaff's, Whitman the former temperance writer began a couple of years of unemployed carousing; he was clearly remaking his image, going to bars more often than he had since he left New Orleans a decade earlier. At Pfaff's, he mingled with figures like Henry Clapp, the influential editor of the anti-establishment Saturday Press. . . . Whitman also became friends with many writers, some well known at the time: Ada Clare, Fitz-James O'Brien, George Arnold, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. It was here, too, that a young William Dean Howells met Whitman" (61).
People Mentioned in this Work
- Arnold, George [pages: 61]
- Mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- Burroughs, John [pages: 87]
- Burroughs first met Whitman in Washington, D.C., in 1863 but he "had started frequenting Pfaff's beerhall in New York [several years earlier] in the hope of meeting Whitman, whose work he greatly admired" (87).
- Clapp, Henry Jr. [pages: 61]
- Mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- Clare, Ada [pages: 61]
- Mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- Fred Gray Association, The [pages: 62]
- "A loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection."
- Howells, William Dean [pages: 61]
- Mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- O'Brien, Fitz-James [pages: 61]
- Mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- Stedman, Edmund Clarence [pages: 61]
- Stedman in mentioned as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's.
- Vaughan, Frederick B. [pages: 62]
- Vaughan, a young stage driver of Irish origin with whom Whitman "clearly had an intense relationship at this time [i.e., the Pfaff's period]," is identified as a possible inspiriation for "the sequence of homoerotic love poems Whitman called 'Live Oak, with Moss.'" After leaving Pfaff's Vaughan married and fathered four children. His contact with Whitman in the post-Pfaff's period was sporadic.
- Vedder, Elihu [pages: 60]
- Vedder is mentioned as a friend of Whitman.
- Whitman, Walt [pages: 61,62,87]
- Whitman's connection with Pfaff's is mentioned on pages 61, 62, and 87.
Related Works
- Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. "Walt Whitman." The Walt Whitman Archive. http://www.whitmanarchive.org, 2006. [more about this work]
