Call Number:

F0819

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

23 item

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0099, F0819, Horace Traubel collection of Walt Whitman papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

1854-1916 (inclusive)

Creator:

Traubel, Horace, 1858-1919

Form:

Letters (correspondence), Clippings (information artifacts), Periodicals, Prospectuses, Subscription lists, Order forms, and Engravings (prints)

Abstract:

This collection comprises materials collected by Horace Traubel, American journalist, on his longtime friend, poet Walt Whitman.

American poet Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, and died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman published nine separate editions of his most well-known work,

Leaves of Grass beginning in 1855. Over the next thirty-seven years, Whitman revised the poems, as well as adding new poems and deleting other poems from each edition. In 1881 Whitman settled on the final arrangement of the poems and thereafter no further revisions were made. All new poems written after 1881 were added as annexes to subsequent additions of Leaves of Grass.

"Walt Whitman."Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (accessed April 2008).

American journalist, editor, and author, Horace Traubel (1858-1919) was best known for his multivolume,

With Walt Whitman in Camden: A Diary, a detailed account of his close association with the famous poet between March of 1888 and January of 1889. A friend of Whitman's from 1873 until his death, he became one of Whitman's literary executors and subsequently an editor of In Re Walt Whitman (1893) and the ten-volume Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (1902). In 1890 Traubel founded and edited a monthly magazine, the Conservator, which promoted Marxian socialism and reflected Whitman's substantial influence. From 1903 to 1907 he served as editor of the Artsman, a publication of the Rose Valley Movement, a communal enterprise located southwest of Philadelphia. Traubel also wrote prose verse and published two volumes, Chants Communal (1904) and Optimos.

"Horace Traubel." Contemporary Authors Online reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (accessed April 2008).

Horace Traubel, Whitman's friend and one of his literary executors, collected this batch of printed newsletters, an engraving, and ephemera, as well as an autograph note written by Whitman to his friend John Burroughs. The brief autograph letter to Burroughs is matted with an printed engraving of Walt Whitman. The printed material includes nine issues of the Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers (1894-1904) and the February 19, 1916 issue of Revolt , which bears inscriptions by Traubel. Additionally the collection has a prospectus, subscription list, and blank order form for a facsimile of the 1860-1861 edition of Leaves of Grass , to be printed by Horace Traubel; a prospectus with order form for Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments: left by Walt Whitman ; a reprint from The Era Magazine (1903) of Traubel's article, "Walt Whitman at Fifty Dollars a Volume, and How He Came to It;" a clipping from The New York Times (February 24, 1906) which included a review of Traubel's book, With Walt Whitman in Camden . There are also three printed images of Whitman and one print of his birthplace in Long Island, all of which appear to have been cut from a book.

The collection is arranged in chronological order.