David S. Reynolds Comments on Walt Whitman Recent Discovery

In a Walt Whitman Novel, Lost for 165 Years, Clues to 'Leaves of Grass'

The New York Times, 2.20.17

"This is Whitman's take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the "upper 10 thousand" - what we would call the 1 percent - against the lower million," said David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But it also, Mr. Reynolds and other scholars who have seen it say, offers clues to another mystery: how a workaday journalist and mostly conventional poet transformed himself into the author of the sensuous, philosophical, wildly experimental and altogether unclassifiable free verse of 'Leaves of Grass.' This story also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many other publications.