Can you believe that 165 years later a grad student with a hankering for SQL-query writing and access to the Library of Congress's digital database for newspapers was able to discover a serialized novel written under a pseudonym?
I may have misrepresented the details above, but not the essence, A grad student and Whitman scholar moved on to another one of his Whitman projects: searching various databases for anything that uses names from Whitman's unpublished notes.
A main character named Jack Engle? Go...
He got a series of hits from a currently defunct newspaper from the 1850s, had the pages microfiche sent over, and set about reading it.
Consensus: the world has been gifted previously unknown Whitman content.
It's Uncle Walt as a young man and young writer, but pieces of the foundation of Leaves of Grass are all over the place, like the nurse-centurion in Fiskadoro is really the heart of the story Johnson wants to write in Tree of Smoke.
Anyway, it's been described as "pre-modern Pynchon" for its naming shenanigans and plot twists.
Reports are that the ending is where Whitman lost interest more than a conclusion of the plots/story.
Check out an article about it here.
For a PDF of the book itself before it goes up for sale on Amazon, click here.
Whitman's prose - the scant amount I exposed myself to - seems like it's simply a less formalized version of his poetry. My memory could be quite faulty on this, but he ranges all over the lot, separating sentences and thoughts with dashes in a herky-jerky hodgepodge. Thanks for this, though, I'm very interested.
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