Introduction
The Mickle Street Ménage
Serendipity: Visitors and Vignettes
Walt on Walt
Walt on the Whitman Family
Walt on Images of Himself
Memories of Long Island, Brooklyn,and Manhattan
Credos
Walt on the Literary Life
Before "Leaves of Grass"
About "Leaves of Grass"
Individual Poems and Sequences
Printing "Leaves of Grass"
"Leaves of Grass" and the Critics
Advice
Expurgation
Waning Powers
Avowal Letters
Walt and His Inner Circle
A Flaminger Soul: William Douglas O’Connor
Magnificent Potencies: Robert Green Ingersoll
Walt and His Boys
Walt’s “Big Secret”
Views of America
Affection, Love, and Sex
The Woman Sex
Memories of Washington and the Secession War
Turned to a Generous Key: Abraham Lincoln
Race
Famous Authors
Walt and the Bard
Sweet Magnetic Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oxygenated Men and Women: Walt’s Pantheon
Scoundrel Time
Ecclesiastic
Music, Opera, and Marietta
Bottoms Up
Walt’s Way with Words
Peeves
Pleasures
Walt on Various and Sundry
“A Frightful Gone-ness” —The Physical Decline
“A Voice from Death” —The Last Months
“The Last Mile Driven” —The End
“The Touch of Peace” —Mortuary
The Burial House at Harleigh Cemetery
The Last Hurrah: May 1919
Citations
Bibliographical Note
Index