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Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a jour­nalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before.

One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel’s later discovery were plot notes Whit­man had made in one of his private notebooks.

Whitman’s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inacces­sible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks’ wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman’s beauti­ful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman’s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.

Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.

In Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, selections span from early works like Sarah Louise Forten’s anti-slavery poem “The Grave of the Slave” (1831) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), a novel about her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of journalism, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s revenge fantasy, “When I Was a Witch” (1910) and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem on the fraught nature of African American motherhood, “Maternity” (1922). In between, readers will discover many vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century.

Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed—powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “a lifted world.”




 

Emily Dickinson on sex, desire, and “the chapter . . . in the night.” Emma Goldman against the tyranny of marriage. Ida B. Wells against lynching. Anna Julia Cooper on Black American womanhood. Frances Willard on riding a bicycle. Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.

In Volume 2: Memoir, Essays, and Oratory, selections span from early works like Sarah Mapps Douglass’s anti-slavery appeal “A Mother’s Love” (1832) and Maria W. Stewart’s “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall” (1833), to Zitkala-Sa’s memories in “The Land of Red Apples” (1921) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s moving final essay “The Right to Die” (1935). In between, readers will discover a whole host of vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century.

Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed—powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “a lifted world.”

In Red Business, Walt Whitman readers can explore nearly all his notebooks and manuscript fragments from the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. In addition to Whitman’s numerous accounts of Civil War soldiers, Red Business contains the infamous notebook in which Whitman records his feverish obsession with his young companion Peter Doyle, as well as several difficult to find, unpublished poems and essays.

Matt Miller and Zachary Turpin’s meticulous transcriptions of Whitman’s written materials allow readers to explore the often-neglected final chapter of Whitman’s life, as he battled ailments, prepared speeches, and received famous visitors, all the while continuing to write revealing new poems.

Walt Whitman’s 1848 stint in New Orleans was a crucial moment of development for the poet. Working for The Daily Crescent, a new local newspaper, Whitman spent his days strolling through the multiracial city and turning his impressions into prose sketches, news items, and fiery editorials. While in the southern metropolis, the young journalist brushed shoulders with American soldiers returning from Mexico, cheered on European revolutions in the French Quarter, and explored raunchy performances at the St. Charles Theatre. Yet 1848 was also the year Whitman began lobbying for “Free Soil,” after encountering in New Orleans, Creole citizens, enslaved Black people, and the slaveholder who would become America’s next president.

Far from some brief escape, New Orleans was a significant milestone in Whitman’s development as a political firebrand, as well as a major step for a professional journalist on the rise. Through a wealth of new texts, contexts, and personalities, Stefan Schöberlein and Zachary Turpin paint a vivid picture of a writer on the verge of Leaves of Grass, embracing the contradictions and the multitudes of New Orleans.