This sourcebook includes the full text of Song of Myself. Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national and linguistic boundaries. Many argue that it is the most influential poem ever written by an American. This sourcebook and critical edition provides easy access to: *information on the contexts of Whitman's work, including biographical details and a chronology *an overview of the critical reception of the poem and extracts from important criticism, reprinted with clear introductory headnotes *key passages from the original 1855 edition, with commentary and annotation *the full 'final' 1881 edition of the poem. Cross-references link the critical, contextual and textual sections of the volume, encouraging an integrated understanding of this creative and controversial text. Complementing a wealth of material with suggestions for further reading, this volume is ideal for readers with no knowledge of the poem, or for those returning anew to a favourite text.

Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national and linguistic boundaries. Many argue that it is the most influential poem ever written by an American. This sourcebook and critical edition provides easy access to: * information on the contexts of Whitman's work, including biographical details and a chronology * an overview of the critical reception of the poem and extracts from important criticism, reprinted with clear introductory headnotes * key passages from the original 1855 edition, with commentary and annotation * the full 'final' 1881 edition of the poem. Cross-references link the critical, contextual and textual sections of the volume, encouraging an integrated understanding of this creative and controversial text. Complementing a wealth of material with suggestions for further reading, this volume is ideal for readers with no knowledge of the poem, or for those returning anew to a favourite text.

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture--a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionizing the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller, and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for--and sometimes reacting against--the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone s, rented out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as Sandy reinvented himself as William Wells Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights.

Ezra Greenspan s masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown s life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America."

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture - a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionising the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for - and sometimes reacting against - the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.

First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and earlier (often very different) versions of many of the essays, and other materials (including four versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman).

Written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, these essays address a wide range of contemporary issues in his life and art through varying approaches. The volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further reading.

George Palmer Putnam (1814-1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a rich, productive life lived in print, interrelating Putnam's life with the life of his family (one of the most remarkable of its time), with the changing patterns of life in New York City and the nation, and with the institutionalization of modern print culture in nineteenth-century America.

Putnam's roles and achievements were many: he established and ran the publishing house of G. P. Putnam's in New York City; published many of the leading American antebellum writers, male and female, canonical and noncanonical (indeed, was responsible for the first act of American canonization--of Washington Irving); was the leading publisher of art books in his time and launched Putnam's Monthly; led efforts resulting in the institutionalization of the American publishing industry and was the most outspoken promoter of American authorship; led the fight in the United States for international copyright; was the first American publisher to open an overseas (London) branch office; and for a decade was the leading American agent in the international book trade.

Putnam's achievements were not limited to his professional sphere: he was also the founding Superintendent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the official publisher to the New York World's Fair of 1853, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue in New York City during the Civil War, and the organizer of the greatest authors-publishers dinner ever given in nineteenth-century America. Friend and confidant to many of the leading figures of his time, he was not simply a centrally placed publisher but was one of the most centrally placed people of his entire society.

This study is based on meticulous archival research into not only Putnam's own papers but into the records of his business, the papers of other family members, and the archives of persons with whom Putnam had contact through business and social networks. In a finely detailed narrative, Greenspan weaves together the story of Putnam's life and that of the development of print culture in nineteenth-century America to offer an ambitious, comprehensive biography of this "representative American publisher."