Abstract
"Some of the dimmest and least understood years in Walt Whitman's life just precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855. A journalist and fiction writer in the late 1840s, Whitman would go from full-time editorial work to virtually no known publishing at all, starting around 1850. This is not to say he wasn't writing; he was. But what he'd begun writing was far more enigmatic than anything he'd done before. One of his most secretive projects was a novel, serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852 and rediscovered in 2016, its existence entirely unknown. The key to the novel's discovery were plot notes Whitman had made in a handmade notebook now known as "a schoolmaster." Similar notebook jottings also led to Manly Health and Training (1858), another lost prose work of Whitman's that was recently rediscovered. While both of these texts have now appeared as trade volumes, Whitman's greatest proving ground of all-his private notebooks-are still virtually unavailable in any print form. Here, then, is the opening for Turpin and Miller's accessible transcription, which maintains the notebooks' wild and syncretic feel and gives sample illustrations of Whitman's beautiful and unkempt pages. They were Whitman's secret space for developing his poetry, his philosophy, and himself. In this volume, Turpin and Miller have, for the first time, made them available to all"--