More Than One Hundred Additional Reprints of Walt Whitman’s Short Fiction in Periodicals

Abstract

IN 2013, I DETAILED my discovery of 266 reprints of Walt Whitman's short stories in nineteenth and twentieth-century newspapers and magazines published in the United States and abroad.1 Here, I offer an addendum to that bibliography, and document 116 additional previously unknown periodical reprints of Whitman's fiction that have come to light since the publication of that piece, as well as two recent online reprints of his first short story "Death in the School-Room." This brings the total number of previously unknown reprints of the poet's short fiction in periodicals to 382 to date.2 When these new reprints-along with the two recent online publications-are added to those included in previous bibliographies of Whitman's writings, the number of known reprints of the poet's fiction in periodicals totals more than four hundred.3The most often reprinted piece of Whitman's fiction is, and will likely continue to be, "Death in the School-Room. A Fact," which has been reprinted at least 139 times in print newspapers and magazines in the United States and included in online publications or journalism projects at least twice since its initial publication in the August 1841 issue of one of the most prestigious monthly magazines of the time, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (often referred to as the "Democratic Review").4 Whitman's "A Legend of Life and Love" remains the second most often reprinted story, having been copied 99 times in the United States and twice in Canada, for a total of 101 reprints, since it was first published in the Democratic Review in July 1842. The third and fourth most often-reprinted tales, respectively, are "The Tomb-Blossoms," with at least 42 reprints since it was first published in the January 1842 issue of the Democratic Review and "The Death of Wind-Foot," with at least 32 reprints since the story was first published as part of Whitman's temperance novel Franklin Evans; or the Inebriate: A Tale of the Times in an extra edition of the New World newspaper in November 1842.5 These reprint totals, especially those for stories originally published in the Democratic Review, help explain the exaggerated claims a writer for the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper made about Whitman's most popular tales in a brief September 13, 1843, article entitled, "Pay of American Writers": "Recently were published, the sketch of "Death in the School Room," and a "Legend of Life and Love," [sic] both of which, as they respectively appeared, were copied by three fourths of the newspapers in America, and universally admired."6 The writer goes on to assert that the author of those two stories-Whitman is never mentioned by name-"received only five dollars in payment for them" because, at that time, he was not yet a well-known writer with an established literary reputation.Even though, in the opinion of the Dollar Newspaper, the Democratic Review had given Whitman "a sum [that] would not pay for the pen work merely, to say nothing of the labor of the brains" required to create these stories, Whitman kept writing fiction for periodicals. He published short stories until at least 1848, when "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul" was printed in The Union Magazine of Literature and Art, and he wrote a novella, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, that was published in six serial installments in the New York Sunday Dispatch in 1852. Likewise, periodical editors continued reprinting "Death in the School-Room," "A Legend of Life and Love," and other short stories throughout Whitman's lifetime and even in the months following his death in 1892. In fact, from August 1841 to the present, the poet's stories have been reprinted in periodicals in at least 31 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in at least three other countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Australian state of Tasmania.7Two of the most important revelations of this addendum are its documentation of the earliest known international reprint of "Revenge and Requital; A Tale of a Murderer Escaped" (under the title "Revenge and Requital") and the only known international reprint of "The Boy-Lover" (as "The Boy Lover" sans hyphen) in London. …