Whitman

Emory Holloway had already spent seven years recovering lost writing by Walt Whitman, publishing a two volume collection of the poet's uncollected poetry and prose in 1921, before turning that scholarship into Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative, a full biography built on materials no previous life of the poet had used. The book follows Whitman from his working class Long Island and Brooklyn upbringing through his early years as a jobbing journalist and teacher, into the self printing of the first slim edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, a book Whitman kept revising and expanding for the rest of his life, through a final deathbed edition in 1891.

Holloway wrote at a moment when Whitman scholarship still had a great deal to establish about the poet's early career and his personal relationships, and he pursued original research into Whitman's journalism and private life with real energy, using what he had recovered to argue for a more psychologically complex Whitman than earlier, more reverent accounts had offered. He experimented with what reviewers later called a cinema influenced narrative technique, moving scenes and impressions with a visual, sequential quality unusual in biography at the time, an approach credited with making the book unusually readable for a general audience rather than only for specialists.

Reading it means following a biography written by a scholar close enough to his own archival discoveries that the excitement of finding new material shows on the page, and it suits a reader more interested in Whitman the working journalist and private man than in a close reading of Leaves of Grass itself. Later historians have found some of Holloway's interpretive claims about Whitman's personal life overreached, even identifying places where he transcribed manuscript evidence in ways that served the narrative he wanted to tell, a caution worth carrying into any reading of his more speculative chapters.